Comment: “Telemedicine, telementorization and telematic evaluation in surgery. Is it your time after COVID-19?”

To the Editor:

We have read with great interest the article recently published by Rodríguez et al, “Telemedicine, telementoring and telematic evaluation in surgery. Is it their time after COVID-19?”, which raises the importance of exchanging clinical information remotely, either synchronously or asynchronously, using tools like telementoring to facilitate the remote acquisition of clinical knowledge through virtual means¹.

We believe that these new technological tools provide an opportunity to improve surgical skills in minimally invasive procedures, especially in middle-income countries with fewer resources, such as Latin American countries, including Colombia². In addition to being an effective tool during the COVID-19 pandemic, it also enables the interaction with specialists worldwide, which is a key point in the comprehensive training of general surgeons³.

Specifically, the development of minimally invasive surgical skills was previously based on intensive in-person training, a system that was turned upside down with the arrival of COVID-19 due to the difficulty of carrying out in-person rotations. Therefore, platforms like PROXIME, which allow for knowledge to be shared among specialists, residents and medical students, have become an integral part of the innovative strategy to meet the goal of global surgery in the 21st century¹.

Telemedicine is beneficial for the generation and socialization of knowledge by improving the scope of medical care and providing personalized patient care, while reducing the exposure of health teams and reducing the risk of infectious diseases⁴. However, the implementation of these technological tools in Latin America is a challenge due to the lack of economic resources and trained personnel, large populations located in marginalized areas, poorly functioning digital platforms, poor healthcare outreach, deficient acquisition of knowledge, and medical school graduates with gaps in their knowledge⁵.

In 2010, Colombia only had 43 telemedicine or telehealth projects, which benefited only 550 000 people in a country of almost 50 million inhabitants⁵. Therefore, the use of new technologies must be a goal for our population and the Colombian government, which must generate investment opportunities to address these new challenges, improving and progressing hand-in-hand with telemedicine and medical simulation, while creating new techniques that improve the quality and effectiveness of healthcare services⁶.

We would like to thank the authors for providing such evidence, since it is an important issue for all medical professionals in the 21st century. This evidence motivates us to continue generating technological tools for the acquisition of clinical-surgical skills, especially in countries like ours where the use of remote technologies has been on the rise since the arrival of COVID-19.