Clinic AI in Bogotá, what private clinics and health systems should know in 2026

The private care market in Bogotá

Bogotá's health observatory publishes a list, drawn from the national register of health providers (REPS) and cut on 14 October 2026, of sites registered for plastic and aesthetic surgery, oncological plastic surgery and related specialist consultations.⁶ It counts 2,605 sites, of which 2,485 are private, 119 public and one mixed.⁶ The list runs from large clinics to independent professionals practising from a single consulting room.⁶

The city is also getting older. According to the observatory, using DANE projections updated in 2025 with the District Planning Secretariat, the share of people aged 65 and over rose from 13 to 16 in every 100 between 2018 and 2026, and the ageing index from 63 to 91.⁵

The rules a Bogotá clinic works under

Law 1581 of 2012 is Colombia's general data protection law. Article 5 lists data relating to health among sensitive data, and article 6 prohibits processing sensitive data unless the patient has given explicit authorisation, apart from the cases the law sets out.¹ Article 9 requires prior, informed authorisation obtained by a means that can be consulted later, and article 10 waives it in cases of medical or health emergency.¹

Article 19 makes the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio, through its delegate for personal data protection, the authority that supervises how personal data is processed.¹² Article 26 prohibits transfers to countries without adequate protection, with an exception for medical data exchanges that the patient's treatment requires.¹

Law 2015 of 2020 created the interoperable electronic clinical history, known as IHCE.³ Article 3 obliges health service providers to place clinical history data, documents and files on the interoperability platform the national government provides, under terms set by the Ministry of Health and Social Protection.³⁴ Article 5 keeps every provider, public or private, responsible for the custody of its patients' records in its own systems, and article 6 makes each person the owner of their electronic clinical history.³

wai hosts each clinic's records in its own country, under that country's rules. We set this up with your clinic. wai is compliant with these rules and built for clinics in Bogotá. The clinic can export a log of every message, draft, approval and signature, and gets thirty days notice before any named subprocessor changes.⁸

wai is built to connect to Colombia's interoperable electronic clinical history (IHCE). We set up your clinic's connection with you.

The languages Bogotá patients write in

Article 10 of the Colombian Constitution makes Spanish the official language of Colombia, and the languages of ethnic groups are also official in their own territories.⁷

wai works in any language, and a patient can answer the intake questions by voice in Spanish or any other language.⁹ Every reply is drafted in the language the patient used, and a person at the clinic approves it before it is sent.

What a demo shows in Bogotá

The demo opens on a WhatsApp message sent at 9:15pm from Usaquén. A woman asks whether she can see the plastic surgeon for a first consultation next week, and whether her sister can come in the same afternoon. wai reads the surgeon's busy times from Google Calendar, Outlook or Apple Calendar and drafts a reply in Spanish offering two adjoining open times. The coordinator approves it at 7:30am.

Before approving, the coordinator adds the clinic's data processing authorisation, so explicit consent for her health data is on file before she arrives, as article 6 of Law 1581 requires.¹ Reminders go out before the visit, and if she cancels, the time is offered to the waitlist.

In the consultation wai drafts the note and the surgeon reviews and signs it. Codes come from the signed note and the claim is prepared for the patient's insurer, ready for the team to check. Bring a week of real WhatsApp enquiries and missed calls and watch each one drafted.

For hospital groups, insurers and the district in Bogotá

Hospital groups, insurers and public bodies in Bogotá can have wai build a system for one care pathway, designed around how the IHCE platform receives clinical data. The organisation owns what is built, with data and model rights agreed in the contract, as the organisations page describes.

Where to start

First, write an authorisation for health data and for recording consultations with AI, keep it in a form you can produce later, and send it with each new patient's first reply.¹ The consent form template gives a base to adapt into Spanish.

Second, map which of your clinical history data the IHCE platform will receive and who in the clinic answers for custody of the records.³ Third, export a week of WhatsApp enquiries and mark the ones that arrived after closing, then bring them to a fifteen-minute demo.

Frequently asked questions