Health-ICT examines the role of data science as an essential tool for healthcare

GMV took part in the 8th Health‑ICT conference, which on this occasion was held as part of “TECH DAY”, an event organized by the Innovative Technologies Alliance of the Valencian Community (Inndromeda). According to the organizers, the purpose of the conference was to “highlight the value of collaboration between different types of organizations (health research foundations, technological institutes, universities, companies, etc.) as a key factor in exploiting health data.” And furthermore, to underline “how technology is generating tools and platforms capable of analyzing thousands of data items in real time, allowing healthcare administrators and professionals to make data-driven decisions and streamlining processes and diagnoses.”

Adrián Rodrigo, from Business Solutions - Smart Health in GMV’s Secure e-Solutions department, took part in the round table presentation of big data exploitation projects. Success stories were shared in which collaboration between organizations, either nationally or internationally, was vital to get the most out of data and yield solutions in various healthcare fields with a positive impact on society.

The GMV executive presented the Models of Patient Engagement for Alzheimer’s Disease ( MOPEAD ) project, a European initiative “aimed at giving the public an active role in the early detection of the disease. The aim of the project was to raise people’s awareness and increase their engagement in diagnosis, thus also helping to identify unknown cases and focusing on prevention.” The results “provided new clinical data on the disease at an early stage that will aid in the development of novel therapeutic approaches to stop Alzheimer’s disease.”

As Rodrigo explained, the research “compared the effectiveness of several strategies for detecting undiagnosed cases in very early stages through four models of citizen engagement: an online platform, ACE Foundation open days, a 10-minute test run by primary care doctors and a neuropsychological test for patients diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, considered a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease.” All the strategies applied patient recruitment techniques, but “the first is particularly noteworthy, where online marketing techniques were used to recruit participants.”

The solution implemented to meet the needs of MOPEAD involved setting up a series of portals and data collection processes that “ensured an acceptable level of data quality and whose main purpose was to generate multiple data sources throughout the project phases.” It had “a big data platform that harmonized the various data sources and made it easier to analyze them in order to obtain evidence,” said the GMV expert.