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As the baby boom generation (people born in 1946 through 1965) reached their most disability-prone years, the number of claims and subsequent appeals for disability benefits skyrocketed. This strained the United States Social Security Administration’s ability (SSA) to keep pace with the demand for hearings. A hearing is a proceeding before an administrative law judge requested by a claimant when he or she disagrees with a determination SSA has made. SSA has made use of video conferencing technology as a means of meeting this challenge.

This good practice consists in implementing an information service specialized in medicines quality within the Social Insurance Fund of Costa Rica’s (Caja Costarricense de Seguro Social – CCSS) Laboratory for Medicines Standards and Quality (Laboratorio de Normas y Calidad de Medicamentos – LNCM) for the benefit of health professionals working in the institution’s services network. The service offers impartial and timely technical and scientific information as an optimum strategy for providing individuals with the specific information they need.

Over the past few years, the Social Insurance Bank (Banco de Previsión Social – BPS) has been promoting and exploring the possibility of using public software rather than creating a new system or issuing a call for tenders to acquire one, with the aim of making optimum use of government resources and to avoid “reinventing the wheel”. The term “public software” is used to describe any piece of software that has been developed using government resources and that should therefore be available for the different government organizations to share.

As part of its policies to promote a social security institution that is more effective and efficient and closer to the people, allowing their quality of life to be improved, a strategy for multi-channel services has been drawn up with the aim of offering citizens different channels of customer service depending on their needs.

E-training has come to the fore as a means of enabling training programmes to be offered to the organization’s officials on a large scale. Until now, the method has relied on so-called Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), and more specifically the Moodle platform, which is used by the institution.

The aim is to improve this training method by adopting videoconferencing as an e-training tool, using synchronous techniques to enable real-time interaction between speakers in different locations and, with other strategies, to replicate on-site courses.

June 2015: after taking up the post of Director of Foreign Travel at the Social Health Insurance Institute (Seguro Social de Salud – EsSalud), I had the following experience: a patient had come back from a foreign country after spending a month there and I decided to go with him to his first check-up in Peru. The attending doctor looked at me and asked “What do you want me to do with this patient? He has had a type of treatment that we don’t use in this country and I’m not familiar with it.