The World Information Technology and Services Alliance (WITSA) has granted its Innovative e-Health Solutions Award to HEXIN, the Big Data platform for mining clinical and epidemiological data of the Galician Health Service (Servicio Gallego de Salud: SERGAS). Developed with GMV technology, HEXIN is the first system of its type taken up by a Spanish region, furnishing over 300 healthcare professionals with information made up by predefined reports with clinically useful stats, adding up to a total of 800 corporate documents all available to the general public.

The WITSA Global ICT Excellence Awards recognize the world’s outstanding ICT users, distinguishing those organizations that have pulled off exceptional feats in ICT use to the benefit of the public at large, governments, individuals, organizations and the private sector. HEXIN was nominated for the WITSA Awards by the Spanish Association of electronic, information-technology, telecommunications and digital-contents firms (Asociación de Empresas de Electrónica, Tecnologías de la Información, Telecomunicaciones y Contenidos Digitales: AMETIC), a member of this consortium of international associations representing over ninety percent of the world ICT market.

HEXIN, the Big Data platform developed with GMV technology, helps to improve epidemiological monitoring, clinical assistance, medical management and research. By mining the vast amount of information held by the Galician Health Service — medical reports, notes, prescriptions, diagnostic tests arising from its various areas of competence — it has now become an essential tool for healthcare professionals to extract information and obtain the best healthcare results for their patients. A further knock-on benefit is that the information obtained facilitates assessment of the pharmacy model by means of data-mining techniques, comparing the patterns of the various pharmaceutical services.

The sheer amount of data generated by health systems nowadays, duly analyzed by platforms like HEXIN, enables etiological correlations to be drawn between, for example, diverse rare diseases, helping to predict and head off any contagion. HEXIN makes it possible to find out easily the total number of people presenting certain symptoms or the incidence and prevalence of diseases, suspected adverse side effects and risk factors. The system is capable of supporting diagnoses and treatment and even of bringing healthcare protocols into line with chronic diseases.

What benefits does HEXIN bring to patients, clinicians and researchers?

For patients, an early diagnosis can help to improve the quality of life. It also represents a significant cost saving, making treatment more affordable for patients and the whole health system more sustainable. Likewise, in the treatment of chronic diseases, the system also facilitates patient monitoring (adherence to treatments, visits to specialists …) flagging up any breaches, helping to analyze treatment effectiveness, improving its efficacy and saving time and money.

At the same time, by comparing patients with similar symptoms or measuring comorbidity (presence of one or more disorders or illnesses apart from the primary illness or disorder) it feeds information into medical research and the development of new drugs. To do so, it abides by all ruling cybersecurity, privacy and data-protection law. Access permission calls for previous data-anonymization processing.