By ariel delgado, md, ms & conner gorry cuba has been building a national strategy using information and communication technologies (icts) for health since the es- tablishment of the national medical sciences information center (cnicm) in 1965. back then, vital statistics and health data – con- sidered a cornerstone of the country’s new universal health sys- tem – were transmitted by hand or over the phone. as technology grew more sophisticated over the next 30 years, microprocessors and computers were integrated into the process. in 1992, reeling from economic crisis, cuba founded the national health telem- atics network known as infomed (www.sld.cu), betting on the strategy that icts could be used to improve population health at low cost. from these initial efforts until today, the country has fol- lowed a policy to build and strengthen a virtual health information infrastructure.[1] early on, systematizing health data took on a sense of urgency as cuba confronted the double burden of infectious and chronic dis- eases and their implications for health policy and programs. but data collection threatened to escalate and administrative respon- sibilities falling to the country’s health practitioners, then as now, took time away from patients. none of this is unique to cuba: health systems in the developing world face the same double burden, while also coming under increasing pressure to produce reliable health statistics for international funders and to measure progress towards the un millennium goals