Healthcare at the Artificial Intelligence Summit 2022

At the 5th Artificial Intelligence Summit 2022 organized by AMETIC, its president, Pedro Mier, highlighted the maturity that artificial intelligence has reached in Spain in the last five years, considering it one of the country’s key resources for boosting industry, the economy, and sustainability.

In the healthcare industry, AI-linked technology is of particular relevance in two aspects of healthcare management. According to Inmaculada Pérez, Digital Health Manager at GMV’s Secure e-Solutions, this is because it helps to improve the speed and efficiency of diagnoses and allows for personalized treatments and continuous patient monitoring. As a result, it ensures better resource allocation and therefore improves the healthcare system’s sustainability. In addition, AI helps to accelerate research projects in a number of health fields, especially those engaged in developing new medicinal products.

Respecting patients’ rights

GMV is tackling this challenge through the TARTAGLIA project, which aims to implement AI mechanisms within federated data networks. This would prevent data from leaving their points of origin and avoid anonymization, with the consequent loss of quality and efficiency in the algorithms, facilitating the training of AI models in a distributed and secure manner, while respecting the rights of the data owners, that is, the patients. The company’s intention is for Spain to become a supplier of innovation rather than a mere consumer, and to do so, it must seize the opportunities that the National Health System offers because of its characteristics.

The most important event in the calendar to find out where artificial intelligence is heading was opened by the First Vice-President and Minister for Economic Affairs and Digital Transformation, Nadia Calviño, who stressed the importance of harnessing the great potential offered by this set of disruptive technologies. To this end, she pointed out the need for “the entire digitalization process, hastened by the arrival of the pandemic, to take place in an environment of trust, in an inclusive and sustainable manner, and placing people at the center.”

Carissa Véliz, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and the event’s keynote speaker, stressed the need for reflection on the importance of privacy in the digital context of AI, its best use, and respect for the rights of individuals. In turn, the Secretary of State for Digitalization and Artificial Intelligence stated in her closing remarks that “artificial intelligence is no longer the future, it is now.” The level in Spain is “amazing in terms of inclusion, sustainability, and health, where we have seen great examples at public and state level,” concluded Carmen Artigas.