RHEA Awarded Contract to Support the Health Council of Madrid

The Regional Government of Madrid, through the Regional Ministry of Health, has begun a public purchase of innovative technology, which will allow the implementation of a service platform that will provide clinicians, managers and researchers with tools for the governance, collection, transformation, querying, viewing and analysis of data to provide knowledge and support for decision-making, according to the Madrilenian Health Service strategies.

This new system is the first of its kind in Spain and is a further step towards the unification of healthcare data in the Madrid hospital network, which will enable a more precise identification of the different procedures operating in the social and healthcare sector, providing more and higher-quality information and resulting in more efficient treatments with fewer hospital admissions and improved efficiency, as well as reducing the duplication of tests by using information obtained from the use of large databases with up-to-the-minute information.

The project, called INFOBANCO, has a specific deadline for implementation – June 2023 – and involves an investment of €1.97 million, co-financed by ERDF through the Ministry of Science and Innovation. To develop the new platform, a consortium led by NTT DATA, and comprising Better and RHEA, has created a tool to improve current and future technological systems, which will make it possible to improve value-based healthcare, biomedical research and other secondary uses. The information will be stored in a data lake – a standardized repository that allows all clinical information to be aggregated in one place – to centralize information and make it sharable. In addition, all clinical data will be stored in an open Electronic Health Record (HER) format using the Better Platform and will be harmonized with international standards.

This first implementation will be carried out at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre in Madrid, the first node in the network of hospitals, which will serve as the first step towards a network model that allows inter-hospital data sharing. This furthers the government’s goal of creating a regional data network architecture to support the healthcare service for the 7 million people in the Region of Madrid.

Increased efficiency

The platform will provide more real-time visibility of operations, patient experience and feedback, as well as the behaviour of the different actors involved. It will also improve the intelligence of the system and the quality and accuracy of the decisions to be made.

In this first phase, patients at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre will benefit from a better user experience in the form of greater availability of medical care, access to medical records, analysis and test results, and the possibility of diagnosing and treating diseases in their first phase. Meanwhile, healthcare professionals will be able to detect, predict, alert, relate and catalogue information better with the creation of patterns of behaviour, treatment, progress and the development of algorithms.

Jordi Fontestad, Director of Data Health Spain at NTT DATA, said: “With this project we take a great leap forward, enabling a unified view of all electronic systems so that all the information in the hospital network can be processed. We are talking about a learning and research platform that, for the first time, includes a standardized repository that allows all clinical information to be aggregated in a single place, and a tool that allows current systems to develop. It is undoubtedly one of the most cutting-edge projects in the healthcare sector worldwide and once again demonstrates how strong we are in technological innovation and improving clinical practice and research”.

The new platform that NTT DATA is going to implement at the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre has the highest security measures, including certifications in the National Security Scheme and anti-hacking tests.

Nicola Mann, RHEA’s Chief Operating Officer and Vice-President for Spain, said: “This is a great opportunity for our Spanish team to apply the expertise we have gained in both the health and space sectors. Our teams are renowned for their innovative approach and experience in big data architectures and for platforms combining the experience from different activities that will fit together perfectly for this solution. One example is our role taking responsibility for the data security and governance in the much-acclaimed Horizon 2020 project PANACEA, a research and innovation project providing a secure platform to support the exchange of information and distribution of hospital data through cloud services.

“We are also a leader in cloud systems, delivering efficiency savings through IT automation and self-service, and numerous international cloud initiatives for on-premises and public data owners. Although our heritage in Spain comes from the space sector, our experts welcome opportunities to work in other sectors, especially in areas where we know our technology and expertise can make a real difference.”

Jovan Pavićević, International Markets Unit Director at Better, said: “We have first started working in Spain and with NTT Data last year and we are proud to see that Infobanco and Hospital 12 de Octubre are our first success and first customer in the Spanish market. They are known to be an innovation-driven hospital, which goes well with our innovation-driven culture, and selecting Better Platform is an acknowledgment of that. We see that all markets are moving in a similar direction, developing regional architectures and standardized data repositories based on open data models, whether we are talking about research and secondary use of the data, or care providing and care coordination. We hope that this will be an example project and that other hospitals and regions in Spain will follow this journey of standardizing and opening up the data in order to deliver patient-centric care and build innovative solutions around it”.

David Moner, Head of the technical department and Consultant on Semantic Interoperability at VeraTech, said: “INFOBANCO is not just an implementation project of a new clinical information system. It establishes a new strategy for developing those systems with clinical information models in the centre. Using openEHR as a pivot standard, reusing internationally validated archetypes, and in combination with other standards such as HL7 FHIR, OMOP CDM or SNOMED CT, ensures the development of a future-proof platform. It serves for the purposes of the current project, but it is also a solid basis for the evolution and fulfilment of future clinical information needs in the Community of Madrid. VeraTech, as health data partner, is thrilled to share its knowledge about semantic interoperability and standards with our partners for the success of this leading-edge project.”

This project has been financed within the line of financing under Thematic Objective 1 of the European Regional Development Fund, enhancing research, technological development and innovation.