Around 150 professionals attend the La Unió seminar on artificial intelligence in health

On 7 June, La Unió, in collaboration with the Health/AI Programme, held the seminar ‘Artificial Intelligence: a mosaic of realities in health with opportunities and risks to manage’. About 150 people from the field of management, direction, ICT and innovation areas, and research staff working at La Unió member organisations followed the seminar live. The session set out the general lines of the Health/AI Programme and the Health AI Observatory, plus four experiences of using AI in SISCAT organisations that are La Unió members.

In her welcome speech, Roser Fernández, the General Director of La Unió, stressed the need to approach the use of AI in health from a systemic perspective: “One of the most strategic changes in the health system and health organisations involves digital transformation and artificial intelligence, and how, through good governance and management, we put this tool at the service of individual care that is increasingly preventive, predictive, personalised and participative, while strengthening the value of the human touch. It is a great challenge, which cannot be tackled individually, and is a systemic challenge that we can only tackle properly if we do it together. So La Unió celebrates the creation of the Programme and the Health/AI Observatory, which we want to feel, and do feel, part of”.

In the same vein, Joan Guanyabens, the director of the TIC Salut Social Foundation, pointed out that the public governance model is fundamental so that AI can meet the needs of teams of health professionals and citizens. “The role of the administration is, on the one hand, to set priorities and needs and promote challenges to solve them; and on the other hand, to make data available to build the algorithms and evaluate them before they are implemented”, Guanyabens said.

The head of the Health AI Observatory at the ICT Social Health Foundation, Núria Abdón, presented how the Observatory works, the reports that have been published in recent months and how many algorithms have been identified so far. Abdón also emphasised that “the Observatory is the gateway to all the AI initiatives of the SISCAT organisations, and the way to request support from the Health/AI Programme”.

At the conference, four selected Observatory cases from La Unió member organisations were presented: Hospital Clínic’s skin cancer diagnosis platform, oropharyngeal dysphagia screening at Maresme Health Consortium, the hospital occupancy prediction system at Sant Joan de Déu Hospital, and the low-complexity management and guidance system at the Parc Taulí Health Corporation’s Emergency Department