Data has become the new gold and Madrid healthcare is a mine. That is why the Community of Madrid has been preparing a Silicon Valley-style project for years, which since it was made public has garnered international distinctions. This is “Genesis”, the largest healthcare data warehouse in Europecapable of storing millions of raw medical records.
Technologies like big data and the data mining They allow you to decipher invisible patterns and transform data into decisions. But all this intelligence needs a home, a space where it can coexist and be analyzed: that place is what is known as a “data lake”, a huge lake of information which, in the case of Madrid, has become the largest on the continent.
How a healthcare data lake works
Data storage is carried out in its native format, that is, unprocessed and retaining its original attributes. This allows organizations to analyze large volumes of valuable information and extract it for strategic decision making. Sectors such as healthcare can use this data to improve patient care and optimize resources.
Genesis integrates more than 1.6 billion files coming from 400 different sources, which has allowed us to improve patient care and optimize the work of the more than 35,000 professionals of the Madrid Health Service (Sermas). Its benefits include the reduction of time and costs in healthcare processes and greater accessibility and security in the management of clinical information for both citizens and professionals.
This has led to the Community of Madrid to be recognized in the Data Impact Awardsorganized by the American technology company Cloudera. The general director of Digital Health of the Department of Digitalization, Nuria Ruiz, received the award during the Evolve25 event, held in London. In his speech, the work of the Madrid Executive was highlighted “in search of a more modern and unified healthcare, in which data is the central axis of technological evolution.”
When information saves lives
Thanks to Genesis, SERMAS has been able promote studies on the evolution of transplant patients, the medical effects of heat waves, the clinical impact of certain drugs or mortality associated with myocardial infarction, among others. These investigations allow doctors to anticipate diagnoses, predict health crises and make more effective decisions based on evidence and analysis of real data.
Furthermore, the Spanish project is part of the European initiative European Health Data Space (EHDS), aimed at share anonymized data from over 700 million records across Europewhich aims to promote cooperation and medical research between countries so that in the future Europe continues to be the spearhead in research in the health sector.