- This European Union–funded initiative anticipates future models of data governance and exchange promoted across Europe and Spain
Population ageing and the growing prevalence of dependency situations are driving a profound transformation of care systems. Ensuring high-quality care for elderly and dependent individuals requires increasingly close coordination between healthcare professionals, social services, care providers and public administrations.
However, the information required to deliver such care remains fragmented across multiple organisations and technological platforms. This fragmentation hinders access to a comprehensive view of the individual, creates inefficiencies, forces the duplication of administrative processes and limits the ability to anticipate risk situations or provide truly personalised care.
To address these challenges, digital health and clinical care company Ubikare and the technology centre IKERLAN are collaborating on the development of ESSAD (Interoperable and Secure Socio-Health Data Space), an infrastructure designed to enable the secure exchange of information among the different stakeholders involved in home care.
The initiative will allow data to follow individuals wherever they receive care, fostering greater continuity of care, improved coordination between organisations and faster, better-informed decision-making based on up-to-date and reliable information.
ESSAD is built on a shared vision: moving towards a more connected, efficient and person-centred care model. Ubikare contributes its expertise in care service management and the development of digital solutions for the healthcare and socio-health sectors, while IKERLAN brings advanced technological capabilities in digitalisation, interoperability, data spaces, cybersecurity and trusted information management.
“ESSAD is not a data repository, but a trusted infrastructure that ensures information is available to those who need it, when they need it, with full guarantees of security, traceability and control. The solution is based on three key pillars: data governance, interoperability between systems and scalability to meet future ecosystem needs,” explains Iker Perez de Albeniz, Innovation Director at Ubikare and project lead.
“One of the main challenges in the socio-health domain is that information remains fragmented across organisations and systems that cannot always communicate with each other. At IKERLAN, we work to remove these barriers through technologies that enable secure, traceable and interoperable data sharing. ESSAD is an example of how data spaces can help build more connected and effective services,” says Marco González, Head of Artificial Intelligence and Data at IKERLAN.
Greater continuity of care and reduced administrative burden
The potential impact of ESSAD translates into tangible improvements for users, professionals and public administrations.
For example, the platform will allow key information about a dependent individual to accompany them when changing home care providers or relocating to another municipality, avoiding the need to repeat assessments, procedures and processes already completed.
It will also facilitate collaboration between public administrations and service providers by enabling secure access to up-to-date and verified information. This will improve care quality monitoring, enable earlier identification of needs, and optimise planning and allocation of public resources.
In addition, the availability of shared information will streamline administrative and care processes, reducing bureaucratic burden and promoting more coordinated, efficient and person-centred care tailored to each individual’s real needs.
A benchmark for the future of socio-health data
Beyond the technological development, the project includes the creation of a white paper or best practice guide with recommendations for implementing secure information-sharing models in the socio-health domain.
It also foresees the creation of a working group open to new public and private stakeholders, aimed at promoting shared data governance models and advancing greater integration of health and care services.
In this context, ESSAD takes a further step beyond the current European framework. While Europe is already laying the foundations for the future European Health Data Space (EHDS), its regulatory development has yet to define the highest level of technical detail. Beyond proposing the use of standards such as FHIR or HealthDCAT-AP, Ubikare and IKERLAN have translated these principles into a concrete implementation. The technical team has designed a solution —accompanied by a white paper— that enables information systems from different organizations to interoperate automatically, while ensuring that each patient’s data is accessible only to the appropriate professional according to their role (physician, nurse or caregiver). By addressing this technical challenge, which is not yet fully specified at the regulatory level, Ubikare plans to publicly share this advancement so that it can serve as a reference and help drive common standards across the entire health and social care sector.
ESSAD aligns with the European strategy for building secure and trustworthy data spaces to improve public services and generate new innovation opportunities. In this context, the project will help prepare the socio-health sector for the European Health Data Space and the future National Health Data Space, promoting a model in which data becomes a key enabler of more coordinated, efficient and human-centred care.
ESSAD receives European funding through a call for technological products and services for data spaces promoted by the State Secretariat for Digitalisation and Artificial Intelligence (SEDIA), within the framework of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan.
The ESSAD project will enable the secure sharing of socio-health information among the various stakeholders involved in the care of elderly and dependent people.
