The Cantabrian Health Service (SCS) will be the first in Spain to fully embrace artificial intelligence (AI), developed by IOMED Medical Solutions, to structure electronic health records (EHR) across its entire healthcare system.

Thus, Cantabria will have an AI and machine learning tool that will allow it to work with millions of clinical data from both the three hospitals in the region (Valdecilla, Sierrallana-Tres Mares, and Laredo) and all primary care centers.This technology will enable healthcare professionals and researchers to access the millions of data stored in the SCS in a tenth of the time it would take for manual research and cross-reference consultations with other centers, known as federated clinical research.

In this way, the SCS hopes Cantabria will become a hub for national and international health research.According to the Spanish Registry of Clinical Trials (REec), Cantabria is the fourth region in the number of clinical trials per inhabitant, behind only Madrid, Catalonia, and Navarra, a position that will be reinforced and even improved with this initiative.The tool has been provided to the SCS by IOMED Medical Solutions for free. Its function is to transform the data from free-text EHRs (clinical notes, clinical course, progress notes, medical reports of diagnostic tests, discharge reports, surgical intervention reports, etc.) into a coded database using standard clinical vocabularies (SNOMED, ICD-9, ICD-10, LOINC, etc.).

‍

To do this, the system implements artificial intelligence and natural language processing processes that structure all the written information and provide exhaustive knowledge about millions of patient data, which can better identify the symptoms of many diseases and make more precise diagnoses and treatments. All data is anonymized to comply with the law and remains on SCS servers.For the Health Minister, Raúl Pesquera, "IOMED's investment in artificial intelligence will allow Cantabria to take a giant step forward in research that will result in better patient service.

‍

The SCS joins a federated clinical research network

Leading research centers in Europe already use AI to share their research inquiries without sharing sensitive patient data. This allows collaboration between different hospitals in a federated clinical research network to conduct clinical studies that incorporate millions of data from thousands of patients and publish in high-impact scientific journals.

‍

‍