Confirmed Keynotes and Invited Talks

Keynotes:

Professor Fernando Martin-Sanchez

Professor Fernando Martin-Sanchez PhD, FACHI, FACMI, CHIA, MIAHSI
Biography:
Prof Fernando Martin-Sanchez is a tenured Research Professor in Biomedical Informatics and Digital Health and Coordinator of a new research centre CROSADIS (Chronicity, Digital Health and Systems) at the National Institute of Health ´Carlos III´ of Spain. From 2015 to 2017 he was Full Professor at the Division of Health Informatics at Weill Cornell Medicine and participated in the US Precision Medicine Initiative. Prior to this, he was the Chair of Health Informatics at the Melbourne Medical School and foundational Director of the Health and Biomedical Informatics Centre (HaBIC) at the University of Melbourne. He holds PhDs in Informatics and Medicine; an MSc in Knowledge Engineering and a BSc in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He has worked in the Joint Program in Biomedical Engineering between Emory University Hospital and Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta USA, and in the National Institute of Health Carlos III in Madrid, Spain, where he was the CIO and then Founding Director of the Medical Bioinformatics Research Group. He has served as a Vice-President of the International Medical Informatics Association and as Chair of the Scientific Program Committee for the XV World Conference in Health and Biomedical Informatics, MEDINFO 2015. With more than 200 peer-reviewed publications (h-index 25), his research has been cited more than 2600 times and funded by some 40 grants from the European Commission, and main agencies from Spain, Australia and the USA. His research interests cover a wide range of topics related to informatics methods and systems in translational research (big data linkage and integration), precision medicine (genome and exposome data processing) and participatory health (social media, quantified-self). He is a Fellow of ACMI (American College of Medical Informatics) and ACHI (Australasian College of Health Informatics, Certified Health Informatician Australasia (CHIA) founding member of the IMIA International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics (IAHSI) and Honorary Professorial Fellow with the University of Melbourne’s Medical School. He is Associate Editor of the journal Methods of Information in Medicine and is the Chair of the new IMIA Working Group on Exposome Informatics. He was recently awarded with the 2018 National Prize of Health Informatics (Category: Research) by the Spanish Health Informatics Society.
Title: Overview of current large-scale initiatives in Spain in Digital Health, Big Data and Precision Medicine
Abstract:
After my return to Spain in July 2017, I had the opportunity to appreciate the advances that have taken place in Spain in areas related to the application of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in Health. Spain has a publicly funded healthcare system with universal coverage, both in primary and specialized care. The management of healthcare is decentralized, with competences transferred to the 17 regions and 2 cities that make up the state. Spain has a health expenditure of 9% of GDP and a life expectancy rate among the highest in the world, however it faces several challenges, among which we can mention the aging of the population, the increase in chronicity, the need for greater prevention, the improvement of quality and the variability in healthcare services. ICT is an essential tool to improve the quality and efficiency of health services and the country has made a considerable effort in recent years to deploy clinical and public health information systems. Although the implementation of electronic medical record, electronic prescription, and telemedicine is currently a reality, with implantation rates close to 100%, there are numerous opportunities for improvement in areas such as interoperability of systems, creation of repositories of clinical data for secondary use, precision medicine, the professionalization of health informatics and the increase of digital competences in health professionals. In my presentation I will describe the initiatives that are being launched in the last year to address these challenges, including the creation of the CROSADIS Research Center, the national Precision Medicine initiative, the Big Data in Health project and the Professionalization Forum for Health Informatics.