A digital strategy for Spain is being drawn up which will address five areas: ecosystems 4.0, data, citizens, regulation, and infrastructure. While a centralized AI strategy is being formed, private ventures are moving forward with developing various AI projects.

Demand for AI tools in healthcare is increas- ing in Spain, where 11% of healthcare providers already use AI and a further 42% have specific plans to implement AI tools. Every citizen in Spain has a health ID with a unique personal identifier code. “This allows us to easily link datasets and track patients throughout the system,” said Anna García-Altés, head of the Catalan health system observatory at the Agency for Health Quality and Assessment of Catalonia.

Currently healthcare professionals are not able to access or share the EPR on a national level, because each region uses a different system. A lack of trust from medical staff and a lack of sufficient high-quality data to train AI tools are seen as main challenges. But improved medical decision making and improved quality of care are considered the biggest benefits.

Spain has several AI research groups, and most universities with computer science or engineer- ing programmes host such groups. Particular strengths of the academic community in Spain are, for example, multi-agent systems, machine learning, optimisation and metaheuristics, and planning and fuzzy logic. The latter has a long research tradi- tion in Spain.

In robotics research there are a variety of groups with focus on vision, service, soft & collaborative robotics, medical, agriculture and aerial/under- water robotics. In addition, a variety of AI associations such as AEIPA (Spanish AI Association) and ACIA (Catalan AI Association), as well as robotics groups such as AER (Spanish Robotics and Auto- mation Association), HISPAROB (Spanish Plat- form on Robotics) and SEIDROB (Spanish Society for R&D in Robotics) are active in Spain.

Key initiatives

1. HOSPITAL UNIVERSITARIO PUERTA DE HIERRO MAJADAHONDA, MADRID

www.madrid.org/cs/

IT- and data-facilitated innovations are taking place in various departments such as the development of a consumer-facing app that is helping more than 1,500 cancer patients better participate in their care. OncoApp is available for Android and Apple users, and aims to provide cancer patients and their families with personalized information and advice about their illness and will soon be making use of AI.

2. MEDIKATOR

www.mediktor.com/en /business-solutions

The aim of Mediktor is to develop digital & mobile health solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques. It is a pre-diagnose and triage solution that covers the most prevalent pathologies at the Emergency Services. It has served insurance companies, hospitals, pharma companies and other healthcare providers.

3. THE INSTITUTE OF SANITARY RESEARCH OF THE SAN CARLOS CLINICAL HOSPITAL, MADRID

www.madrid.org/cs/

Fujitsu has unveiled a new healthcare solution designed to improve clinical decision-making, following a successful field trial with San Carlos Clinical Hospital in Madrid. It deploys Fujitsu Laboratories’ state of the art anonymization technologies and Fujitsu’s data analytics technologies, tailored to meet the specific needs of the local Spanish healthcare sector. Key benefits include faster, improved clinical decision-making, with high risk assessment accuracy.

4. SAVANA

savanamed.com/company/ about-us/

A data mining project that generates predictive models that anticipate the best medical intervention for a patient by tapping into a wealth of clinical knowledge that has been underused until now. The first company that has been able to subspecialize this AI technology to convert free speech contained in clinical records in a database, and to mine this data. Its platform for clinical decision support, based on real-time dynamic exploitation of all the information contained in EHRs; Savana performs immediate statistical analysis of all patients seen in the platform (which can be queried either searching all the available EHRs, or those belonging only to a single hospital, depending on the institution’s interests), and offers results
relevant to input variables provided by the users.

5. MEDLAB MEDIA GROUP

mmg-ai.com/en/people/

Start-up from Madrid has raised $11.2 million in funding to develop a suite of products that assists the medical community in knowledge sharing and information flow. The company’s DeepAIMed platform is a search engine that uses a wide range of trusted sources combined with AI, NLP, and image recognition to provide the global medical community with reliable information for diagnoses and decision making. MedLab has developed partnerships with global content providers and a number of Spanish-speaking institutions across the globe.