Whitepaper
Building a regional health data backbone
Lessons from Catalonia on scaling digital platforms underpinned by open standards
This whitepaper presents one of the largets implementations of an openEHR-based Clinical Data Repository at population scale, supporting over 13 million patients in Catalonia. It outlines how vitagroup’s Health Intelligence Platform (HIP) underpins the region’s open data foundation and details the technical challenges encountered when moving from fragmented systems to a longitudinal, patient-centred model.
Drawing on extensive optimisation work, the paper demonstrates how performance barriers in large-scale openEHR deployments can be overcome through a combination of in-memory query processing, targeted indexing, and query design strategies. The results show substantial improvements in query response times and scalability, while highlighting the need for a hybrid architectural approach to support both transactional and analytical workloads.
The findings provide a practical blueprint for healthcare systems looking to implement open, vendor-neutral data platforms at regional or national scale.
