María Alejandra Palacios-Ariza

Dr. Palacios-Ariza is an assistant instructor at the Fundación Universitaria Sanitas in Bogotá, Colombia. She received her medical degree from Universidad del Rosario in 2011 and took on clinical clerkships at the Italian Hospital of Buenos Aires. She served her mandatory social service in a regional hospital taking on a broad range of clinical and administrative responsibilities. After her mandatory posting, she took on a position at Hospital de Suba in Bogotá as a public health physician providing primary care assistance to local families. She then took on a position as a research assistant at Fundación Santa Fé de Bogotá conducting research in medical imaging in 2014. Dr. Palacios-Ariza completed her specialization in Epidemiology at Universidad del Rosario in 2016, with a thesis on the treatment of cavernous angiomas. In 2016, Dr. Palacios-Ariza moved on to administrative positions working with Colombian healthcare organizations where she acquired considerable experience in the intricacies of the local healthcare system. During this time, the programs she led received governmental recognition for their excellent data management and reporting, leading to enhanced outcomes in large cohorts of patients. In 2018, she completed her MSc in Epidemiology at Universidad del Rosario with a clinical and economic analysis on two treatments for iron deficiency in heart failure patients. In 2019, she took on her current position as assistant instructor where she works as methodological advisor to research projects in psychiatry, pediatrics, dermatology and cardiovascular medicine. She has also taken on independent research projects, receiving the Juan Jacobo Muñoz International Award in Health Sciences in two occasions: in 2019 obtained the first place for a project studying the changes experienced by service areas for stroke centers under Bogotá’s challenging traffic conditions and in 2022, the third place for a clinical trial which aimed to determine the effectiveness of non-immersive virtual reality as a pain-distraction measure in children undergoing painful injection procedures. In 2023, she completed her M.Ed for health professionals with a qualitative research with a sociomaterialism approach tittle “Human Dx in the learning of clinical reasoning in medical students”. Dr. Palacios-Ariza is pursuing a master’s degree in biomedical informatics.