Spain
Servicio Murciano de Salud is the public entity responsible for coordinating and delivering healthcare services in the Spanish region of Murcia. Its mission is to ensure efficient, high-quality medical care for citizens by managing the system’s human, technological, and financial resources, which regional health departments currently oversee. In recent years, the organization has driven the technological transformation of the healthcare system, integrating its data sources to maximize the value of its information for advancing medicine.
Managing healthcare for a growing population
The management of resources within Spain’s National Health System falls under the jurisdiction of its Autonomous Communities. In the Region of Murcia, Servicio Murciano de Salud delivers healthcare services through 10 public hospitals, 185 health centers, and 186 local clinics, serving over 1.5 million people. At the same time, Servicio Murciano de Salud has successfully standardized applications across healthcare services, the growing demand for data in research and scientific studies—both from internal and external stakeholders— and the regulation on European data spaces led to the need for a unified, centralized data platform.
Improving data access, efficiency – and collaboration across ‘health data spaces’
The organization faced a significant challenge: data access had been handled manually and on a case-by-case basis, processes that became unsustainable as requests surged. Internal and external researchers required access to anonymized data for studies, clinical trials, and dissertations. Additionally, there was a growing need to develop more analytics, machine learning, and AI algorithms to support decision-making in healthcare.
This transformation is happening within a broader regulatory framework at both national and European levels, which mandates public institutions to establish ‘health data spaces’ that enable secure and efficient data sharing. Therefore, they created “Azud,” their unified data lakehouse, to improve clinical decision-making.
With their flexibility, scalability, and strong data governance capabilities, platforms like Cloudera have allowed Servicio Murciano de Salud to comply with these regulations seamlessly. The Spanish government has allocated €28 million across all Autonomous Communities to support the creation of the National Health Data Space.
This initiative's ultimate goal is to integrate with the European Health Data Space (EHDS), enabling seamless data sharing to advance medical research and healthcare. This will help drive synergies in disease diagnosis, predict health risks, foster innovation, and inform public health policies, ultimately improving European healthcare for citizens.
A unified platform for data, a foundation for AI
In collaboration with Fujitsu, the Murcia Healthcare System selected Cloudera as its systems integrator due to its technical suitability for data management and scalability. This decision aligns with the organization’s long-term vision of utilizing generative AI capabilities in the future.
The Murcia healthcare system has placed data at the center of its operations. Its unified platform, built on Cloudera's open data lakehouse architecture, was developed on-premises infrastructure, given the sensitive nature of the information it handles.
Thanks to this new system, they can address their needs to integrate all information sources, industrialize and automate complex data processing, correlate all these different sources to speed up decision-making and deploy predictive models through machine learning.
Data is gathered from source systems using Apache Nifi, Cloudera Data Flow, and other features of Cloudera’s integrated data-in-motion technologies. The platform supports parallel processing with Spark ETL and other engines. With Cloudera AI, Servicio Murciano de Salud can conduct real-time analytics on its datasets and enhance its machine learning and AI capabilities.
Adopting a centralized model has been crucial for ensuring compliance with evolving European regulations. Thanks to Cloudera’s robust SDX governance capabilities, the platform guarantees that only authorized users can access data, facilitating clinical research with anonymized patient information. It also utilizes standardized data models for secure data sharing, such as the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM), which is the standard chosen by the European Union.
Seamless sharing across international data spaces
Healthcare data includes structured information but also vast amounts of unstructured data, such as reports, text notes, and radiology images. The new Cloudera-based platform enables seamless information sharing and integration with other data spaces at both national and European levels.
Adding a unified platform built on Cloudera is delivering significant time and cost savings. Healthcare institutions can now train AI algorithms using pre-existing datasets from other regions, maximizing prior research efforts and improving overall efficiency. As more organizations create health data spaces and share information, the impact will grow exponentially.
Expanding to new AI use cases for healthcare
Servicio Murciano de Salud is currently expanding its capabilities to comply with healthcare data space regulations and deliver innovation. It has a strong foundation in place, having already implemented a unified data lakehouse for the entire system during the initial phase of development. This has enabled the integration of information from across primary care and hospitals into a single platform.
Building on this data lakehouse architecture, Servicio Murciano de Salud used Cloudera AI to successfully build and implement two real-world use cases using AI models, allowing for measurable impact. One healthcare use case focuses on diabetic patients and their comorbidities, while the other addresses antibiotic use and results —a growing public health concern due to increasing resistance. The goal is to pave the way for deeper AI integration into the healthcare system, incorporating more data sources, including genomic data, to maximize its potential.
In this second phase of expansion, the organization will enhance the platform’s capabilities by integrating natural language processing tools. The plan is to build more generative AI use cases on the Cloudera platform in the future, aiming to optimize consultation time, assist in diagnostics, and improve home healthcare services.
Beyond clinical applications, the organization also sees opportunities to leverage AI for human resource management and administrative processes. With Cloudera, Servicio Murciano de Salud can deliver data-driven healthcare, significantly enhancing the quality of service and quality of life for over 1.5 million people.
