The Hospital de Sant Pau and Barcelona Health Hub ally to accelerate clinical validations

The Hospital de Sant Pau and the Barcelona Health Hub (BHH) have joined forces to promote a center that will serve to accelerate the clinical validations of new technological solutions applied to health. It will be located in the Sant Pau Art Nouveau Site, where the BHH is also located, an innovation hub that brings together startups and corporations under one roof. Dr. Mar Gomis-Pastor will be the director of the center.

"The challenge is to gain time," says Òscar Garcia-Esquirol, medical director of BHH and co-founder of Mediktor, an emerging company that offers a medical assistant with artificial intelligence (AI). In that sense, Garcia-Esquirol saw how his proposal took nine and a half months to overcome a key step for its commercialization, the ethics committee. "It is difficult for startups to reach patients, which causes many to end up dying along the way before obtaining results," adds Gomis-Pastor. It will also serve to bring validated and quality technologies to Sant Pau, remarks the doctor, as well as to change its culture, towards a more innovative and digital one.

The operation of the new center will consist of the BHH receiving proposals for technologies that need to be clinically validated and reach the users for whom they have been created, developed by both startups and companies as well as by other hospitals. Some examples of these new solutions can be mobile applications to improve cardiovascular risk or sleep quality; sensors to measure temperature; the use of AI to improve the triage method in emergencies, or virtual reality glasses for certain medical processes in which the patient suffers and needs to relax.

Once filtered by the BHH, they will arrive at the Hospital de Sant Pau, where professionals and patients will test the safety and effectiveness of the new technological solutions. The unit led by Gomis-Pastor, made up of about five people, will be in charge of coordinating the process, with the support of an advisory scientific committee. If the clinical trial is successfully completed, the technology developer will obtain validation from a reference health center. The last step will be the adoption of the innovation in the day-to-day life of Sant Pau or other hospitals.

The investment to launch the center has been 455,000 euros, contributed by the private foundation of the Hospital de Sant Pau. The new validation unit is expected to be self-sustainable, considering that technology developers will pay for the service provided, with a price range that can go from 75,000 euros to 250,000 euros, depending on the difficulty or scope of the clinical trial.

Both the healthcare center and the BHH expect high demand. During this 2022, they already foresee carrying out four validations starting in September. For next year, they expect to add five more. Likewise, work is being done with the idea of exporting the approach developed in Sant Pau, creating a network of national and international hospitals that also form part of the clinical trials. "Barcelona thus positions itself as a digital health hub at a European and global level," defends Garcia-Esquirol, "with good professionals, a technological ecosystem, and investors."