The Eurecat Congress was attended by experts and key players in the Catalan healthcare industry who discussed how innovation and new technological tools are changing, and can improve in the future, the healthcare system and lifelong wellbeing. They unpacked the challenges and opportunities brought by the emergence of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, new data monitoring and gathering systems, and new bespoke services for patients.
The transition to a new healthcare model will have to tackle challenges such as the ageing population, rising chronic diseases and the shortage of professionals alongside financial and environmental sustainability, as was made clear at the panel discussion “The future in lifelong health and wellbeing”.
This is a pivotal time in which “we are shifting towards a more preventive, precision and personalised model, posing many challenges yet also a great chance to promote talent,” said Felip Miralles, Eurecat’s Health Technologies director, who moderated the session at which the panel members concurred on the current opportunity to promote the health technologies sector, both medical technologies and biotechnologies, as an economic driving force and for harnessing emerging talent.
Health technologies “are a strategic area for Eurecat and accordingly we play and will play a pivotal role as a knowledge-based innovation actor and organiser of public-private partnerships,” he added, noting that “at Eurecat we are committed to interdisciplinary technological innovation which delivers real value and can be scaled up from the ground.”
Part of the discussion hinged on the importance of patient data in this new technological context. “The current challenge is to build robust models and integrate and standardise data because artificial intelligence can help us, for instance, in detecting and treating strokes among many other applications,” commented Carlos Molina, head of the Neurology and Stroke Unit at Vall d’Hebron Hospital. This requirement to gather and work with personal data “still has some way to go because they are data which are specially protected by law,” added Joan Guanyabens, director of the ICT Social and Health Foundation. “We have to keep to the European guidelines and create data spaces which can be harnessed to enhance people’s lives.”
The need to train professionals, patients and families in how to use these new technologies, especially at the care level, was also high on the agenda. “We have to shift towards a care model based on a person-centred network of services, bringing healthcare and social services closer to people’s homes and communities,” argued Montserrat Bernabeu, Director of Care and Co-Director of the Guttmann Institute. She identified three priority technological development areas to make this transformation happen: “remote assessment and monitoring systems which enable continuous and personalised follow-up; generating quality data which make it easier to develop artificial intelligence algorithms with predictive and decision-making support capabilities, and digital platforms allowing therapeutic interventions built into the patient’s everyday life, including personalised coaching solutions.”
The panel discussion also featured presentations from start-ups such as Onalabs, which is innovating in gathering biomarker data through sweat analysis. Elisabet del Valle, its CEO, spoke about the challenges and restrictions in setting up a business in the healthcare industry: “getting financing is tricky and there is the added complication of validations in an innovative sector where you have to be constantly on the move.” In her view, the key to success and generating impact is to “develop long-term strategies since innovation is continuous, cyclical and lifelong.”
Well-established innovative healthcare industry firms were also in attendance. One of them was Avinent, and Albert Giralt, its CEO, noted the importance of building trust between companies and medical teams. “We have to learn to collaborate much earlier than we were used to, getting involved as a company right from the start of the process so we can bring patients personalised service,” he said. He thinks that tech solution providers for the healthcare industry “shouldn’t just offer products but also services and work closely with healthcare professionals.”
The experts agreed on a common goal: to continue improving and expanding the ecosystem and “generate a conversation between those who have the need and those who have the solution,” commented Joan Guanyabens. “Needs are endless; we can always enhance health and wellbeing and we are seeing that technology can do the same. We have to find a way to bring hunger and food together.”
