Possibilities of the cloud in the health sector

The Association of Computer Scientists of Health Institutions of Castilla y León (AIISCYL) in conjunction with Segovia’s Integrated Health Management Department held its XIII Technical Conference which focused on “Health in the Cloud”. At this specialist forum, GMV presented HEXIN, its Platform for the exploitation of clinical and epidemiological data for the Galician Health Service.

As the organisers explained, the cloud “offers the health sector a range of possibilities as regards health personnel mobility, Big Data, Medical Imaging, Telemedicine, Teletraining… providing a viable alternative for the dimensioning and acquisition of computer resources.” All of the foregoing, plus information security in the health sector, the dependence on communications and other factors that could give those working in the sector cause for concern when using this type of technology were dealt with at the Conference.
The specifications of the HEXIN platform and the opportunities which the exploitation of clinical and epidemiological data offer health systems were explained by Víctor Ferrero del Valle, the HEXIN Project Head, and Rubén Villoria Medina, its Technical Manager.

As they explained, HEXIN “is able to obtain clinical data for epidemiological monitoring, clinical assistance, management and research with a great capacity for calculation at a low cost.” In addition, “it is capable of handling unstructured information and obtaining information registers which, to date, have not been accessible automatically.”

The Platform is currently working with the health data of 2,747,559 Galicians, drawn from 34 different sources of information and approximately 10 million clinical events per year between 2010 and 2015. Technologically, HEXIN is an ecosystem made up of different products such as Scoop, Talend, Hadoop, Hive, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Drools, J2EE, Pentaho, Oracle, Athento and JSF. It also has a tool, Patient Case Management, for the configuration, management and validation of the platform.

Víctor Ferrero del Valle, HEXIN Project Head, and Rubén Villoria Medina, Technical Manager.