NTT Data has made a big step in healthcare innovation by joining the openEHR International as a platinum industry partner, a move that promises to reshape how clinical data is managed and utilised. In this interview, we speak with Jesus Pulgarin Panos, Senior Manager for Healthcare, and Gonzalo Montesdeoca Zamora, Director, to explore their vision for the future of healthcare IT. Drawing on their extensive experience, they share insights on the challenges of creating truly interoperable health systems, the importance of keeping patient and clinician needs at the core of digital transformation, and their pivotal role in groundbreaking projects like Catalonia’s Open Health Platform.
NTT Data has joined the openEHR community – what excites you personally about this step and why do you think it matters for the future of healthcare?
From the beginning of my professional career, once I started to work in the healthcare area, I saw multiple challenges in applying IT in a way that benefits healthcare professionals but especially how IT can benefit the most important element: the patient. I have seen for years approaches that put the clinical act (primary care visit, emergency visit) in the centre, but we can rarely see IT approaches where the clinical process is analysed from a longitudinal perspective.
Still, multiple IT applications are being built or maintained with an old-fashioned approach: that is why you can find vertical applications for primary care, hospitalisation, appointments, laboratory tests, etc. All of them trying to talk the same language but with different data models, technology, terminologies… making interoperability and standardisation utopic.
When we started with the exploration of openEHR, we really imagined the key potential this could bring to benefit professionals, patients, IT solution providers and in general the healthcare ecosystem. We also saw the challenges behind, considering the actual situation in general in the healthcare market. Nevertheless, we are fully committed and convinced that another healthcare model is possible and that changing towards the paradigm of openEHR is a must for the electronic health records of the future.
NTT Data is a massive global company but healthcare is fundamentally a human field. How do you manage to stay personally connected to the needs of clinicians and patients when working on large-scale digital transformation projects?
Our main mantra is that IT healthcare solutions cannot be built without making clinicians and patients part of the development process from the very beginning. I am not specifically referring to IT development approaches like scrum or similar; I prefer to work together, as a single team (not with the view ‘client-provider’ but with the view ‘we have the same aim and the success or the failure is a matter of both parties’). We also look to work physically together at the same place, sharing insights and thoughts, having first-hand knowledge of the real problems that any professional or patient finds when providing care. I spent my first years of professional career working directly in hospitals and I can clearly say that that period was the one when I learned the most about healthcare.
Currently, we try to run projects and services with collaboration models where we can be physically close to both final beneficiaries (patients) and system users (clinicians, nurses, etc) during the development and execution phase. During the development phase, this allows us to better approach the solution, adapt it to the needs and especially to know first-hand any potential element that we can add to make our solution fully suitable to cover both the patient and healthcare professionals’ needs.
You both work in leadership roles in health. What changes have you seen since you began your careers? What’s on the horizon?
I have been working in Healthcare IT for almost 20 years and many changes have happened since I started my professional career. From the functional and business point of view, the most relevant trend we would like to highlight is the evolution of the clinical systems towards being patient-centred and oriented to have health outcomes, instead of the old-fashioned approach based on having clinical stations purely focused on the healthcare professionals. From the technical point of view we cannot avoid mentioning the current impact of the Generative AI, which is bringing us unlimited opportunities to improve how we define, build and deploy the IT tools oriented to patients, healthcare professionals and any other general healthcare stakeholders.
You worked with Tietoevry on Catalonia’s Open Health Platform. The project was described as one of the most forward-looking initiatives in Europe. How were you involved?
Definitely, this project represents one of the most relevant references in terms of development and deployment of an openEHR-based solution in any healthcare area due to different factors: 1) the high level of maturity in terms of information systems already deployed in Catalonia both from functional and technical point of view 2) the reference population that will be affected (> 8 MM people) 3) the complexity of the healthcare landscape, with multiple healthcare applications and the combination of public and private care 4) the approach defined for the project, defined as an open platform and capabilities to allow healthcare providers and stakeholders to design, build and deploy healthcare applications using an open ecosystem in a unified way and ensuring coherence, security, data protection and usability.
In this project, NTT Data worked with Tietoevry, a company which is providing both consultancy services and its solution SmartUI, an openEHR-based application with a wide set of features that will be used to develop several use cases that will validate the capabilities of the platform for its future use.
My role in this project, as Business and Technical Manager, sits at the intersection of ensuring alignment of the solution with clinical information standards (mainly openEHR, but also others like FHIR) and end-to-end solution coherence from the functional point of view. In practice, that means helping ensure the platform’s approach to clinical data is consistent, clinically meaningful, and aligned with a longitudinal, patient-centred view as well as ensuring it will meet patient needs and provide the appropriate health outcomes.
Spain has unique healthcare challenges. What does working on this project mean to you personally?
First of all, it is worth mentioning the challenges derived from working in Spain in Healthcare, with almost totally distributed healthcare organisations among the 17 regions. Despite being the same country, clear differences are present in how healthcare services are organised from the IT strategy point of view and different opinions are shown on the strategy to evolve healthcare: no unique alignment about whether to use one standard or another, different versions of standards, different approaches for IT services construction (bespoke applications on one side, commercial solutions on the other, a mix of all of them in some parts…) Nevertheless, a common factor is that in all cases we have strong capabilities and we can say that the healthcare is in general high-quality.
For me, working on initiatives like this is meaningful because they tackle the “hard part” of digital health: enabling safe continuity across organisations while respecting governance, security, and clinical reality.
On a personal level, I see it as an opportunity to contribute to a model where innovation is not limited to a single product or hospital but becomes an ecosystem capability – so that patients experience care as one journey, not as disconnected episodes.
openEHR promotes openness and sharing. Does that align with your own thinking and with the ethos of NTT?
Yes – openness is not ideology for me; it’s a practical requirement for healthcare sustainability. Open standards and interfaces reduce lock-in, make integration of healthcare systems repeatable, and allow innovation to happen where it creates value (clinical workflows and patient outcomes), not where it creates dependency.
This is aligned with the platform vision we support: a distributed, modular system grounded in open standards and open interfaces to enable native interoperability between components and applications and ensure data is standardised and processed easily and uniformly for any level of care.
NTT operates in 50 countries worldwide and handles complex infrastructures. How does this translate to the work you’re doing in Spain?
The fact is that being part of such a company is, in our case, an opportunity and a key factor where we leverage any company’s capability and create synergies, not to create knowledge ‘silos’ but to get the best from any place and apply it wherever is required. We started to work in this way years ago, and especially from the healthcare perspective it is amust in our case. For example, when talking about openEHR, we have continuous interaction and synergies with other colleagues inside NTT Data who worked or are working with the standard or are interested in it and we help them (and vice versa) to complement our knowledge and capabilities. The same applies in any other IT area.
Can you explain in detail the development of the Catalan Open Health Platform in terms of modularity and open-data standards?
The development approach can be understood as building an open, modular platform where standardised data and interoperability are the foundational capabilities and the cornerstone for any future work. Aligned with the whitepaper of the Department of Health in Catalonia, the Open Health Platform follows a data strategy aligned with national and international initiatives (including the European Health Data Space); ensures relevant information is accessible across territories and levels of care; and enables real-time access and collaboration while avoiding dependency on specific technologies through open standards.
From a modularity standpoint, this naturally drives an architecture made of composable building blocks: identity and access services, consent and auditing, terminology and semantic governance, clinical data services, integration/API management, and analytics capabilities – all governed through shared standards for formats, terminologies and classifications. The goal is not “one monolithic system”, but a platform that allows multiple providers and applications to participate safely, consistently, and sustainably.
How does openEHR fit into the picture specifically?
openEHR fits as the standards-based backbone for longitudinal clinical information – exactly the type of harmonised, integrated data “from the origin” that the strategy of the Department of Health advocates. When clinical meaning is modelled explicitly (and governed over time), systems can store, query and reuse data consistently across settings, rather than repeatedly transforming it between incompatible models.
In practice, openEHR provides a robust foundation for structured clinical content, while complementary standards (such as API-oriented approaches and exchange patterns) can support ecosystem integration and application enablement. The key value is that openEHR helps keep the record clinically coherent over time, enabling safer reuse for care continuity, decision support, and analytics – without losing meaning as data moves across systems.
What are the biggest technical difficulties you envisage with clinical data from multiple hospitals and providers in Catalonia/ Spain?
The hardest problems we envisage are semantic consistency and governance at scale. Multiple providers document the same concepts differently; data quality varies; duplicates appear; and workflows generate information that is not always captured in a reusable way. This implies an operational impact on professionals: many report that slow or fragmented systems delay their work, that documentation overhead is too high, and that getting information often requires using side channels like phone, email, or chat – all of which increases risk and burden.
Technically, we must solve identity and matching, consent and purpose limitation, fine-grained access control, auditing, cybersecurity, and high availability – while still delivering real-time performance and a usable experience. And because the platform must include data beyond purely clinical sources (social, educational, environmental, devices, apps), interoperability expands from “hospital-to-hospital” to a broader, multi-sector data ecosystem.
How can you ensure that the platform remains future-proof for advanced analytics and AI-supported care?
Future-proofing starts with systematic use of data used wisely for decision-making, integration of high-quality data, and an open-standards approach that prevents vendor lock-in and supports evolution. If data is harmonised at source and governed through clear standards (including terminologies/classifications), then analytics and AI become safer, more explainable, and more scalable.
Architecturally, modularity is the cornerstone of our proposal. We decouple data from applications, making data available in a unified, structured and standardised way regardless of the modality of care or the professional accessing the platform. Semantic, legal and organisational interoperability is a must, so new capabilities (population stratification, predictive models…) can be introduced without redesigning the core. For AI-supported care specifically, these foundations will allow making AI-native solutions in the short term.
Is there any emerging tech that we can expect to see NTT Data using within healthcare in the near future?
The near-term focus is pragmatic innovation that reduces administrative burden and improves patient safety. Smart technologies and AI as enablers to optimise resources, personalise care, and reduce bureaucracy – freeing up clinician time for more human care. That includes AI-supported documentation assistance, process automation for administrative workflows, and decision support integrated into clinical workflows (not isolated tools).
We also see growing relevance in capabilities that strengthen trust and scale: intelligent verification to prevent duplicate/incorrect data, event-driven integration patterns for timely signals, and platform engineering practices that let ecosystems onboard new services faster while maintaining governance and security.
What does success look like for NTT Data healthcare in Spain/ globally in the next decade?
We can summarise the success in the form of: better patient experience, better population health, improved professional well-being, efficiency, and stronger equity and sustainability.
Specifically, success would mean systems that make the person (and their circle) visible across the full care journey, enable an active role for citizens, and deliver accessibility “for everyone, everywhere”.
From a technology perspective, success is also structural: a platform that generates trust (privacy, consent, transparency, cybersecurity), enables integrated high-quality data across sectors, and supports continuous innovation through modularity and open standards – so new care models and new capabilities can be adopted without rebuilding the foundations each time.
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