The University of Barcelona and Siemens Healthineers create a chair to promote education on digital health

Today, the attendants at the signing ceremony were the rector of the UB, Joan Guàrdia; Lluís Donoso, director of the Chair and lecturer of the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences of the UB; Luis Cortina, general manager of Siemens Helathineers Spain; Sourabh Pagaria, executive vice-president and head of the Southern Europe in Siemens Helathineers, and Fernando Pedraza, chief financial officer and member of the Directive Board of the company.

The rector of the UB noted that “the digital healthcare ecosystem describes a complex network of interactions between people, organizations, technologies, information and resources that build up the healthcare system”. “In this idea of ecosystem, the digital healthcare we promote in the Chair is essential to transform the healthcare and disability sector”, he highlighted.

Also, Lluís Donoso, director of the Imaging Center at Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, noted that “artificial intelligence has a great potential in the field of diagnosis, ranging from the improvement of sensitivity and specificity, to the potentiality of doctors assessing and measuring dimensions that were not viable nor practical before”. In this sense, he specified that “Although doctors will continue to be the owners and responsibles for clinical decisions, we will have to define the responsibility regarding the automatized diagnosis. To do so we have to make sure that doctors feel comfortable taking decisions, another goal in this Chair”.

Sourabh Pagaria, executive vice-president and head of Southern Europe in Siemens Healthineers confirmed the usefulness of the initiative: “The training is an absolutely strategic core idea in our company, since thanks to such actions, we will be able to count on a source of experts that can use the value provided by the solutions of digitalization, and in particular, artificial intelligence. We are strongly convinced that the health transformation goes through digitalization, and training projects like this one we sign today are a clear example of the good practices of the company in this sense”.

In the same line, Luis Cortina, general manager of Siemens Healthineers Spain, expressed his satisfaction for the launch of such an activity, which will enable professionals to “provide the best care to the patients”. For Cortina, taking the right decisions can be crucial in the healthcare sector. “Given that the skills of the healthcare professionals usually have a direct impact on the patientsʼ health, education and training are fundamental aspects”, he noted. “Moreover -he added-, the value the digitalization gives to the healthcare environment, both to professionals and patients, who we place at the center of care and as main benefiters of such advances, has already been demonstrated”.