Healthcare may produce vast swathes of data – some estimates put it as the source of as much as 30 per cent of the world’s data volume – but the reality is that the majority is fragmented, unstructured and heterogeneous, hindering the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) in a sector that is undergoing unprecedented digital transformation.
Jordi Cusidó is chief innovation officer at Top Doctors Group, a leading health tech company driving the digital transformation of the healthcare sector by providing cutting-edge technology that offers health systems efficient and accessible digital solutions.
He is leading the deployment of AI-driven solutions in real healthcare environments, and asserts the need for truly interoperable health data platforms so that AI can deliver on its potential in the health service. The platform underpinning this vision is Global HDS, an interoperable health data solution designed to enable secure and scalable AI deployment across healthcare environments. Following Top Doctors Group’s acquisition of Manitex in July 2025, the group is now working with Irish health institutions across the public and private sectors on the adoption of its federated, decentralised data network. This builds on Manitex’s established 25-year presence in the Irish market across community mental health, endoscopy and health intelligence.
Healthcare transformation cannot be achieved through isolated AI applications alone, according to Cusidó. “It requires a robust foundation of interoperable data, governed health data spaces and scalable AI capabilities,” he says. The real opportunity, he says, is to move towards integrated platforms where data and AI work together seamlessly.
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“If data is not homogeneous, it’s very difficult to deploy AI effectively,” he says. “Something that works in a local environment might not work in another environment just because the data is named differently.” This could be something simple – glycaemia can also be called blood sugar, or HbA1c, in medical notes for example. “Generative AI is only as good as the data it is analysing – incorrectly labelled data can lead to negative outcomes.”
Indeed, fragmented health data not only prevents scalable AI, it also creates significant patient risk, Cusidó says. Top Doctors Group’s unique data platform acts as an operating system for health data and AI, standardising data to ensure AI receives clean inputs and preventing the hallucinations of generative AI that can pose patient safety risks.
‘Healthcare providers can access not just a summary, but the whole of your medical data, meaning that the service and the healthcare assistance being provided by a new clinic, wherever it may be, is equally as good as the one that knows you for years’
“What we are building is the next step in the evolution of electronic health records,” he says. “It is an operating system for healthcare, where interoperable data and AI services can run securely and at scale.” More broadly, Top Doctors works in strategic partnership with healthcare organisations to enhance professional reputation and visibility, supported by an extensive product range in the EHR space including AI modules designed to optimise healthcare delivery.
This is welcome news to the Irish health service, where ambitious digital transformation has been beset by difficulties such as legacy infrastructure, paper-based systems and siloed data. With Ireland still at an early stage in the implementation of a national EHR, it is also in a strong position to adopt an interoperable platform of this kind in a more strategic and co-ordinated way.
The catalyst for this, Cusidó explains, is the European Health Data Space (EHDS) regulation, which came into force last year. The regulation, which must be fully implemented in the coming years, aims to establish a common framework for the use and exchange of electronic health data across the EU.
Cusidó notes the positive benefits of this, citing his own experience of breaking his leg in Switzerland last year and then being airlifted to Italy for surgery. Meanwhile, his health data was safe – and inaccessible – in Barcelona. “The health data space regulation means healthcare providers can access not just a summary, but the whole of your medical data, meaning that the service and the healthcare assistance being provided by a new clinic, wherever it may be, is equally as good as the one that knows you for years,” he says. Patients who access care in different health centres even within the same country can often find themselves repeating themselves, he adds; this causes frustration on the part of the patient but may also result in duplicity of care, missed opportunities, or worse: an adverse event.
Cusidó, who will speak at Future Health Summit later this month at Dublin Royal Convention Centre, is keen to emphasise the inherent security of their platform, given the sensitivity of the data involved. “We control the access, the data, the anonymisation, the permissions to access each system. While these regulatory frameworks (GDPR, EHDS, AI Act, NIS2) define the requirements, the real challenge lies in how to operationalise them. Compliance cannot be an afterthought – it needs to be embedded into the architecture itself.
‘Our plan is to build up this European health data space together and boost the deployment of AI’
This is where interoperable data platforms become critical. Only by structuring data, managing access policies and ensuring full traceability at the infrastructure level can healthcare systems meet these regulatory demands while enabling the safe deployment of AI-driven services.”
The ultimate goal is to eventually link the systems of each country so that an EU-wide health data platform is possible. “Our plan is to build up this European health data space together and boost the deployment of AI.”
Top Doctors Group is now present in 11 countries, with broader activity across many more international markets. Their solutions will be extremely important as the digitalisation of healthcare picks up pace in Ireland over the next five to 10 years.
Cusidó praises the Irish health service for taking its first real steps towards embracing system-wide digital solutions such as the EHR. But while adopting such a system will “empower” the Irish health service, he is keen to point out that it should not be seen as a bonus or “nice to have”.
“This type of system will be in place in the next five years in the Irish health service – that is non-negotiable.”
Top Doctors Group is a major sponsor of Future Health Summit, which will take place at Dublin Royal Convention Centre on May 27th and 28th. For more information, visit futurehealthsummit.com
