Ferrer collaborates with Barcelona’s Hospital del Mar on a project to expand knowledge on the progress of COVID-19 patients

Ferrer, in collaboration with the Hospital del Mar and the technological company Bismart, has participated in a ground-breaking project that uses data mining and artificial intelligence tools in natural language processing to analyse and detect common features in patients with COVID-19.

The tool can automatically obtain much more information from the patients' medical records (more than 34,000 hospital and emergency forms have been included, 2,700 of which relate to COVID-19 patients), and so treatments can be better adapted. This type of technology allows much faster exploitation of the information.

Ferrer Spain’s General Manager, Ricardo Castrillo, states that “this initiative responds to Ferrer's mission of bringing real wellbeing to society through innovation and research. The project reinforces our commitment to digitally transforming health, helping to improve clinical results, reducing time in decision making and sharing aspects that represent a positive change in patients and in society. It is necessary for Ferrer, especially in the context of the current pandemic, to keep collaborating with health centres and to do it in an agile way”.

Dr. Laia Sans, associate doctor of the Nephrology Service at the Hospital del Mar and coordinator of the project, jointly with Dr. Julio Pascual, Director of the Healthcare and Medical Area at the centre, and Dr. Jordi Martínez , Director of Innovation and Digital Transformation, pointed out that “the initiative allows us to get a good image of the patients’ characteristics observed in the hospital, without the need to create and feed a new database. This can help us enormously to better understand the disease”.

This project is one of numerous initiatives carried out by Ferrer to contribute to the creation of a better society, promoting people’s real wellbeing.