Clinica Universidad de Navarra incorporates the use of AI to optimize its clinical research

Artificial intelligence will allow the Clinic to analyze millions of clinical data in one-tenth of the time it takes for manual processes.

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Clinica Universidad de Navarra will have access to the artificial intelligence technology developed by IOMED Medical Solutions in order to optimize clinical research and automate hospital processes in order to conduct studies in less time and at a lower cost. This technology will enable healthcare professionals and researchers to access all clinical data stored in the hospital, including unstructured data, which was previously inaccessible, thus facilitating access to real-world clinical data (RWD).

The IOMED technology has been provided free of charge to the hospital. With this technology, electronic health records (EHRs) from the University of Navarra Clinic, which are in an unstructured format, can be transformed into a coded database that will facilitate access to all data by professionals and researchers at the hospital, thus facilitating the generation of real-world evidence (RWE) that will enable conclusions to be drawn in the clinical research processes of the University of Navarra Clinic. This will involve artificial intelligence and natural language processing processes that will structure the clinical information of the hospital center.

Leading research centers in Europe already use this methodology to share their queries without having to share sensitive patient data. EHDEN, a project in which IOMED is involved, aims to create a federated network of medical data at the European level to improve clinical research. This allows collaboration between different hospitals in a federated clinical research network, in order to conduct clinical studies that incorporate millions of data points from thousands of patients and publish in impactful scientific journals.

For Javier de Oca, co-founder and CEO of IOMED, this agreement will contribute to making the Clinica Universidad de Navarra one of the European reference centers for conducting and publishing studies.

"Through the analysis of hundreds of thousands of data points, federated clinical research offers the Clinic the possibility of identifying patterns that help with better diagnosis, treatment, and care of patients, which would be unfeasible for researchers to do manually," explains this expert.

Boosting cancer research

On the other hand, Gabriel Canel, director of the Central Unit for Clinical Trials, highlights the opportunities opened up by the agreement with IOMED: "AI allows us to detect potential improvements in diagnosis and treatment that would require dozens of researchers and many years of data analysis. In the field of oncology, the need for new treatments obliges us to speed up processes. Joining this federated clinical research network will allow us to further enhance our commitment to research in cancer therapies."

Federated clinical research facilitates researchers' access to clinical data that is unstructured and reaches its maximum value when identified and structured, while maintaining the privacy, protection, and governance of this data. The use of Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies to share queries between different healthcare centers will accelerate research and promote collaboration between healthcare organizations.

A fundamental pillar of this collaboration agreement is data protection and privacy. The Clinic will maintain governance over all data at all times. Furthermore, the data will be fully anonymized before processing and conversion into databases.

About Clinica Universidad de Navarra

With more than 2,800 full-time professionals at its locations in Pamplona and Madrid, the University of Navarra Clinic is an academic hospital and a reference in personalized medicine in Spain. Recognized for its research and teaching work, the prestige of its professionals, and its track record in diagnosing and treating highly complex pathologies, the University of Navarra Clinic is a high-resolution hospital due to its diagnostic speed, achieved through multidisciplinary work and the acquisition of the latest technology, offering care in 46 medical and surgical specialties.

The Clinic is ranked among the top one hundred hospitals in the world, according to the World's Best Hospitals ranking, and among the top 35 oncology hospitals in the world according to the World's Best Specialized Hospitals ranking. For the seventh consecutive year, it has been the private hospital with the best reputation in Spain (according to the MRS ranking). For more information: https://www.cun.es/