4YFN - Interview with Hospital Sant Pau

Barcelona Health Hub will shine again at 4YFN 2024, the startup business platform at the Mobile World Congress. The BHH Stand will take the center stage at the Digital Health Area, where you can connect with influential leaders, visionary investors, and the brightest minds in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

One of the organizations that you can meet at 4YFN is BHH member Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau in Barcelona. It’s one of the oldest and leading institutes in the charity-care field in Barcelona. They are committed to provide support to healthcare activities for upgrading medical equipment, and promoting new assistance programs. They are also working together with Barcelona Health Hub in the Digital Health Validation Center project, which aims to accelerate clinical validations of digital health solutions.

Gerardo Ontiveros, Information Systems Coordinator at the Digital Health Validation Center of Hospital Sant Pau, is happy to share about their expectations for this next edition of 4YFN.

• Gerardo, thank you for joining the BHH Stand at the upcoming edition of 4YFN. Can you please introduce yourself and tell us about Hospital Sant Pau?

Hi, it’s a pleasure to be here today at 4YFN. I’m responsible for the IT activities performed in the Digital Health Validation Center, specifically, those related to deploy and integrate technologies to be validated in our Center, a joint initiative between the hospital and Barcelona Health Hub.

Hospital Sant Pau is running with the times, and considering that most of the innovation nowadays is related to digital technology, we consider IT an essential aspect of clinical validations. Through the Digital Health Validation Center, the hospital is promoting high-quality, patient-safe and clinically effective digital solutions, adding up to the current healthcare activity of the hospital, which includes over 35.500 inpatients each year, 160.000 emergencies and more than 460.000 outpatient appointments.

• Can you elaborate about what’s new at the Hospital Sant Pau these days?

In order to ensure that validations are as close to reality as possible, the Digital Health Validation Center includes an area related to IT integration, allowing companies to interact with a real-life testing environment. Traditionally, clinical validations of technology did not include the perspective of technical integration of solutions, thus validating only in test environments (i.e. external websites and the like). To address the need for more realistic validations, Hospital Sant Pau is creating a segregated innovation infrastructure in order to deploy solutions and services to be validated in our premises, it means that this technology can be allocated in an agile way in a secured environment located in Hospital without infer to the production information systems. Moreover, this infrastructure guarantees only access to data for the validation in a secure way creating customized pipelines.

Hospital Sant Pau is a referent to be considered in digital health innovation and makes available to the ecosystem the services and infrastructure to carry out validations of digital solutions in a rigorous and agile way.

• Previous years you have been present at the BHH Stand as well - we’re glad to see you returning to the Digital Health Area of Barcelona Health Hub. Could you share why you decided to join once again?

Well, 4YFN is an excellent opportunity to share our interests and experience with other potential partners who want to be engaged in clinical validation activities, specifically those from the IT sector. We are looking forward to meet IT staff from start-ups, big corporates, investors, healthcare organizations and other relevant players. And we believe that the thrilling ambient of 4YFN is the perfect place for that. In addition, sharing a stand with the BHH allows you to share experiences and activities with other members of the hub in an informal but direct way, talking face to face. The hub allows this type of meeting between entities that share common interests and want to promote innovation in the field of digital health. Another aspect to highlight is when you have some free time in the frenzy of what it means to be in a stand is to have access to conferences of international referents in various fields of technology in the same enclosure.

• What are you excited about at the upcoming 4YFN conference? What can we expect from your stand?

My background is from IT sector, integration and data structuration, with more than 15 years’ experience in healthcare. I’m very thrilled to be here to share with other stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem the services of the center with the aim that the digital solutions that appear on the market and that are offered to society are useful, safe and of quality for users. Sant Pau’s stand is a meeting place between a large Catalan public hospital with startups and technology developers, among others. This symbiosis empowers both parties by allowing technology developers to access a validation of their technology through a rigorous methodology and access to patients, and the hospital to access innovative technology.

• Is there anything else you want to share with us?

I would like to thank to all the people that makes such a congress possible, encouraging companies and healthcare organizations to be engaged in joint activities, and expanding the limits of how technology can bring new opportunities for health. And I would encourage anyone interested to be part of this exciting journey to come and share their interest with us.

If you’re interested in meeting Hospital Sant Pau, don’t hesitate to visit the BHH Stand in Hall 8 on Wednesday 28th and Thursday 29th of February. Mark your agenda for the upcoming edition of 4YFN and meet Hospital Sant Pau. Barcelona Health Hub is already looking forward to meeting you!

More information here.