The Regional Minister for Health, Fátima Matute, highlighted the importance of integrating data management across healthcare delivery, administration, and research, so that it becomes a cornerstone of the regional public healthcare system. Matute spoke at the session Changing Health Together: Driving Value Through Digitalization of the Health System, organized by Boehringer Ingelheim, where she emphasized that the Madrid Region is leading the shift toward a “healthcare system of the future and predictive medicine in which data follows the patient and helps ensure that, over the course of a lifetime, those years are lived with quality.”
“This is achieved through a model of medicine that anticipates disease and, when it does occur, provides early diagnosis, precise treatment, and the most advanced technology to make things easier for patients,” Matute explained. She added that the emergence of new technologies requires “constant change and adaptation.”
As the head of the Health Department stressed, the regional government continues to explore how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its applications in healthcare can “positively impact the care and lives of people.” In this regard, the Madrid Region is working to extend the main benefits of these advances to the population, while maintaining the perspective that such AI “must be governed by natural intelligence, which we must never lose.”
The minister also addressed other challenges posed by the incorporation of these technologies into the healthcare sector, including potential risks related to human resources and the need to create a secure, efficient, and agile framework to embrace the digital health challenge and enable the transformation of the healthcare delivery model.
Matute also underlined the need for “full data interoperability, ensuring that information follows patients throughout their lives across the different health systems in Spain and the European Union.”