With Big Data technology we can mix apples and oranges together

GMV has taken part in the 25th National Conference on Healthcare and Innovation organized by the Spanish Healthcare IT Society (Sociedad de Informática de la Salud: SEIS). Inmaculada Pérez Garro, GMV’s Healthcare Manager was a member of the debating panel called “Treating each cancer with the best procedure”, alongside leading figures like Julio Mayol, Tenure-Holding Surgery Professor of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and Medical Director of the Hospital Clínico San Carlos; Rafael Solana, Secretary General of Healthcare Research, Development and Innovation of Andalusia’s Regional Healthcare Ministry, and Josep Pomar, Manager of Hospital Universitario Son Espases.

The aim of this year’s conference was to investigate the potential of ICTs in fighting cancer with precision (maximum efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness), not only in terms of prevention but also choice of the diagnostic itinerary and particular treatment of each case of cancer.

Inmaculada Pérez Garro presented Big Data’s potential in personalized treatment and diagnosis: Big Data, she argued “brings all the following to the party: specific image processing technology, ontologies for labelling data and creating concepts, specific infrastructure and storage facilities, pattern-identifying algorithms, rules engines for creating cohorts, statistical displays and, last but not least, the necessary traceability and security for handling all this data”.

She also explained how, when it comes to anonymizing big volumes of data, these technologies are able to “break down the information records into more atomic, dynamic events with greater relation capacity”, doing so in an acceptable amount of time. With Big Data “we can seek and create new, multidisciplinary, measureable and comparable indicators,” she pointed out.

The executive explained that Big Data technology lays down no restraints in terms of integrating data from very diverse fields. Using a very eloquent metaphor, she claimed “now, with Big Data, we can mix apples and oranges”. This means that “it is now possible to jointly analyze data of the most diverse sort: demographic, survival, histological, phenotypes, genetics, etc. and find within them specific patterns of particular tumor subtypes”.

Her speech, under the title “Evidence and Privacy in Healthcare”, wound up by running though the healthcare Big Data projects carried out by GMV like Harmony, HEXIN and MOPEAD.

National Antibiotic Resistance Plan Workshop

Failure to stick to the prescribed treatment causes more than 25,000 deaths a year in the European Union. For this reason one of the conference workshops, led by Doctor Jaime Lora Tamayo from the Internal Medicine Service of the Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre, was given over to this problem.

GMV took part in the workshop by bringing out the valuable role of technology in coping with this problem. A national hospital-level study conducted in 2011 showed that only 40% of the surveyed hospitals systematically monitored the use of antibiotics. In light of this telling figure, GMV-developed telemedicine platforms like antari could play a crucial role in dealing with this situation.