Strengthening Early Childhood Integral Care through a Collaborative Web-platform: The case of Plataforma SAIID

Abstract

The global pandemic by COVID-19 promoted in countries and citizens the opening towards new systemic considerations about how to coexist in a globalized world panorama, with high computer, microbiological and commercial traffic (Baricco, 2020). All this, in full correspondence with the aspirations of public policies in recent decades, which emphasized the need for comprehensive approaches to the human being and their development, that set the desire to achieve better socioeconomic approaches associated with health and education, among other areas (Loyacano, 2018; Newell, Tan and Prout, 2021). These comprehensive approaches aimed biological-molecular, as well as historical-cultural, metabolic, and cognitive-behavioral levels of organization (Gottlieb, 2007). However, its translation from paper to practice (and more specifically to the practice of public care in health and education), faced us with important challenges regarding intersectoral articulations (Cunill-Grau, 2010), and the ecologies of knowledge (Santos, 2014) required for its materialization. Currently, the approach to such challenges must also be understood in the context of a society that is going through great accelerations in digital development and knowledge mining, due to the intensive use of intelligent algorithms for information processing, as well as dynamic storage systems, and interconnectivity associated with the so-called Internet 4.0 (Nagao, 2020). Although these characteristics make more complex the potential relationships between the areas that would have to be articulated to move towards more comprehensive approaches, they also enable the use of new generation digital resources and tools that can encourage us to promote the materialization of such aspirations. Under this assumption, the present work systematizes the experience associated with the development of a collaborative web platform, designed, and implemented to support the execution of intersectoral work between professionals in the areas of health and education, which make up the RISA (Integrated Networks of Care Services, for its acronym in Spanish) (Cerdas, 2016). Said networks are made up of interdisciplinary teams that, throughout the national territory, are oriented towards promoting comprehensive and early developmental care of Costa Rican children.