La Rioja transforms healthcare with PASCAL, a data space powered by AWS

The government of La Rioja—through its Fundación Rioja Salud—is revolutionizing healthcare delivery in Spain by building PASCAL, a comprehensive health data lake. PASCAL leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure to enable predictive, participative, preventive, personalized, and precision medicine—the five Ps of modern healthcare.

The challenge: Unlocking healthcare data for better outcomes

Fundación Rioja Salud is a public foundation dedicated to promoting health through research, innovation, and advanced healthcare services for La Rioja’s public health system. Like many regional health systems across Europe, La Rioja faced a critical challenge: Valuable health data remained siloed across multiple systems, making it difficult to generate insights that could improve patient care, optimize resources, and advance medical research.

The organization needed to create a unified data infrastructure that could:

• Integrate diverse healthcare data sources including structured clinical records, medical imaging, genomic data, and unstructured text.
• Support advanced analytics and AI models.
• Enable secure data sharing for research while maintaining strict privacy controls.
• Align with Spain’s National Health Data Space (ENDS) and the European Health Data Space (EHDS) initiatives.
• Scale to handle growing data volumes and computational demands.

Traditional on-premises infrastructure couldn’t provide the flexibility, scalability, and advanced capabilities required to achieve this ambitious vision.

Why AWS: Building a future-ready health data platform

La Rioja selected AWS as the foundation for PASCAL based on existing successful data projects already running on AWS, proven customer experiences, robust security and compliance capabilities, and a comprehensive suite of data analytics and AI services. AWS provides the technological backbone for PASCAL’s key capabilities:

Data integration and storage

The platform ingests data from multiple sources across La Rioja’s health system, storing structured and unstructured data in a scalable data lake architecture based on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3). This architecture breaks down data silos and creates a unified view of health information.

Advanced analytics and AI

PASCAL leverages AWS services to support five innovative use cases:

• One Health: Integrating human and veterinary health data, enabling public health officials to identify cross-species disease patterns and emerging threats through aggregated datasets.
• Chronic kidney disease process modeling: Analyzing patient pathways to identify care delivery bottlenecks and optimize treatment protocols, improving both outcomes and resource utilization.
• Dermatological screening: Developing an AI-powered triage system that collects clinical images to train recognition algorithms, helping prioritize cases requiring specialist attention and reducing wait times for urgent conditions.
• Clinical text analysis: Processing unstructured medical reports from vascular surgery, emergency departments, and other clinical areas using natural language processing to characterize texts and extract insights for research and quality improvement.
• Personalized Medicine: Analyzing genomic and clinical data using Nextflow workflows on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) with Spot Instances, enabling researchers to process complex genomic datasets cost-effectively and tailor treatments to individual genetic profiles.

Security and governance

The comprehensive security services of AWS enable strict data governance controls with cataloging, access controls, and audit capabilities that maintain patient privacy while facilitating legitimate research and clinical use.

Scalability and performance

Cloud infrastructure dynamically scales computing resources from routine analytics to intensive AI model training and genomic analysis.

The impact: Transforming healthcare through data

PASCAL represents a significant milestone in Spain’s digital health transformation. The platform is funded through the European Union’s NextGenerationEU Recovery and Resilience Mechanism as part of the PERTE Salud de Vanguardia (Cutting-Edge Health) initiative, demonstrating its strategic importance to Spain’s healthcare modernization efforts.

By creating a robust data infrastructure on AWS, La Rioja is positioning itself as a leader in data-driven healthcare innovation. The platform enables:

• Better clinical decisions: Clinicians can access comprehensive patient data and AI-powered decision support tools to improve diagnosis and treatment planning.
• Operational efficiency: Hospital administrators can use real-time analytics and predictive models to optimize resource allocation and reduce wait times.
• Research acceleration: Researchers can access de-identified health data to conduct studies that would be impossible with fragmented data sources, accelerating medical discoveries.
• Population health management: Public health officials can identify disease trends and risk factors across the population to implement targeted prevention programs.

The initiative aligns with Fundación Rioja Salud’s mission to create a culture of innovation that values health information as a strategic asset for improving care quality, optimizing resources, and generating new knowledge.

Looking ahead: A model for regional health systems

La Rioja’s PASCAL project demonstrates how regional health systems can leverage cloud technology to transform healthcare delivery. By building on AWS, the organization has created a flexible, scalable platform that can evolve with emerging technologies and growing data volumes.

PASCAL currently operates as a federated data space with a comprehensive data catalog that researchers can access through an ethical review process. When researchers identify datasets needed for their studies, requests are reviewed by the ethics committee, which then grants appropriate access to conduct the research—ensuring both data utility and patient privacy.

The platform is designed for continuous expansion. Future plans include incorporating additional health domains such as the Primary Care Clinical Database (BDCAP), the Minimum Basic Data Set for Hospital Discharges (CMBD), pharmacy prescription data, and health inspection records. This expansion will enable public health officials to identify patterns across aggregated datasets through initiatives like the One Health use case, while also supporting clinical care beyond the digital twin application. Emerging use cases include training and deploying AI models for clinical chatbots and other innovative healthcare applications powered by AI.

The project also exemplifies the broader vision of Spain’s Digital Health Strategy 2021-2026, which aims to develop digital health services, generalize health information interoperability, and promote health data analytics across the National Health System.

As PASCAL continues to develop, it will serve as a reference implementation for other regions looking to build similar capabilities, contributing to the creation of a truly integrated European Health Data Space (EHDS).

Resources

• Discover how AWS is helping healthcare organizations transform through data and AI on this webpage.
• Explore the AWS commitment to supporting public sector innovation on this webpage.
• Learn more about AWS for EHDS on this webpage.