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HARMONY Receives Prize Awarded by the Spanish Health Informatics Society

January 20, 2019 10:58 - x 00, 0 - 00:00

The HARMONY Alliance received an award for its considerable achievements and efforts in the collection and harmonization of 100,000 cases from European patients suffering from Hematological Malignancies (HMs) while guaranteeing the privacy of their data. Its Big Data Platform is transforming the treatment of patients with HMs.

The Spanish Health Informatics Society (SEIS) has recognized the invaluable work being carried out by the HARMONY Alliance at the 24th edition of the National Health Informatics Prizes, which took place in Madrid, Spain, on Thursday, 17 January 2019. HARMONY Project Coordinator, Jesús María Hernández Rivas, Scientific Coordinator of the Research group in Molecular Cytogenetics at IBSAL and Professor at the University of Salamanca, collected the award on behalf of the Alliance.

  

HARMONY received this award for its considerable efforts and achievements in relation to the collection and harmonization of 100,000 cases of European patients suffering from hematological malignancies (HMs) while guaranteeing the privacy of their data. Its Big Data Platform is transforming the treatment of patients with HMs.

In the words of Dr Hernández Rivas, “HARMONY is an ongoing project, one which is still in the first half of its five-year journey, but we have already achieved some relevant results. It’s worth noting that, in only two years, we have developed and launched the HARMONY Big Data Platform, which will host data about some of the most important blood diseases. We have already included datasets from public and private institutions, and we are expecting a significant increase in the pace of data intake in the first half of 2019. It’s also important to mention that there are six approved research proposals and that we have created a forum where all the stakeholders working in the field of hematologic malignancies field can participate”. HARMONY is the largest project within the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s “Big Data for Better Outcomes (BD4BO) Program”.  


Dr Hernández took the opportunity to highlight the contribution of patients to the project, the privacy of whose data is guaranteed in accordance with European Regulations (GDPR, the General Protection Data Regulation) and their implementation at the national level. Thanks to HARMONY’s work in the field of data protection since the project’s inception, presentations about its work have been presented before both the European and the Spanish Parliaments.

Thanks to HARMONY Partner GMV’s Big Data processing-and-analysis technology, research centers connected to the HARMONY Alliance are already shaping the map of hematologic malignancies. This will contribute to shortening the timescale for developing and placing on the market innovative treatments and medicines and streamline the time it will take to fulfill the goal of applying precision medicine to the treatment of blood cancers and to attaining more personalized therapies.

The HARMONY Alliance is already working with and relying on the technologies critical to its meeting its primary goal, which is developing, more quickly and efficiently, new treatments for patients with hematologic malignancies.

 

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