Interview with: Anto Recio project coordinator for the Extremadura Region

This article is part of the “Behind the Scenes” series, in which the UNITE project partners introduce themselves and explain how they will contribute to the transformation of European healthcare.

What motivated you to join the UNITE project, and how does it align with your personal or professional goals?

UNITE is a strategic project for Extremadura. Health is part of our regional intelligence specialization, and I saw a great opportunity to strengthen the regional digital health ecosystem. At FUNDECYT-PCTEX, as a regional science and technology park, we play a role in driving the entire innovation ecosystem. Solving health challenges with deep technologies is a challenge that I personally find very appealing and motivating. This, together with the opportunity to attract funding to develop new digital products with companies in our ecosystem, was the real motivation for participating in this project.

Developing technological solutions with social impact fits in very well with my experience over the last 20 years in digital social innovation, working with technology for a social purpose, with positive effects on the well-being and common good of society. I have always been motivated to work collaboratively to solve social challenges that generate impact in the territory, creating synergies between different stakeholders to consolidate socially profitable ecosystems and territories.

Can you tell us about your team's expertise and how it contributes to UNITE's mission of transforming healthcare through digital innovation?

What are the most pressing healthcare challenges in your region, and how do you believe the UNITE project will address them?

Our region, like many other rural regions in Europe, suffers from the risks of having a population that is widely scattered across the territory, which translates into higher costs for the provision of health services in the territory. If you add to that an ageing population, it further complicates the provision of quality services. Our challenges as a region are varied and diverse, from generating more digital solutions by our companies to strengthen the digital innovation ecosystem and scale it up, to trying to solve the problem of travel from rural areas to hospitals, whether for routine consultations, monitoring chronic diseases or post-operative care. For this reason, one of the priorities of our regional health system is to introduce solutions that facilitate remote monitoring, reducing the cost of healthcare, alleviating waiting lists for in-person appointments and improving patients' quality of life by eliminating the need to travel. Increasing the technological skills of doctors and healthcare personnel is also part of our roadmap as a region.

How do you ensure that ethical considerations and patient privacy are prioritized in the development of new healthcare technologies?

In all project activities, we ensure that patient ethics and privacy are integrated by design and by default throughout the technology lifecycle, and are not treated as an afterthought. First and foremost, we take a privacy and security by design approach, ensuring full compliance with the GDPR and relevant healthcare data regulations. Personal health data is minimized, pseudonymized or anonymized wherever possible, and protected by strong encryption, role-based access control and secure data storage practices.

Secondly, we adopt a clear ethical governance framework, aligned with EU principles such as transparency, accountability, fairness and human oversight. This includes documenting decision-making logic (especially for AI-based systems), avoiding bias in data and algorithms, and ensuring that clinical or healthcare-related decisions always remain under professional human oversight.

Furthermore, informed consent and patient empowerment are fundamental. Patients and end users are clearly informed about how their data is collected, processed and used, and they retain control over their data, including rights of access, portability and deletion. User interfaces are designed to make consent understandable, accessible and revocable at any time.

How do you plan to engage with other consortium partners to ensure the smooth implementation of innovative solutions across regions?

The UNITE project has a solid work plan that includes numerous transregional collaboration activities, a matchmaking platform to facilitate the creation of consortia, working groups where different regional stakeholders interact, a catalogue of service providers, testbeds and living labs, and various collaboration mechanisms. At FUNDECYT-PCTEX, we coordinate the different working groups within the project and have designed methodologies and action plans to promote collaboration between entities from different regions and project partners. Our experience working for more than 25 years on European consortium projects gives us a practical insight into the best tools for bringing together international partners. As a key player in the regional ecosystem of innovation and advanced digitalization, we also connect the needs of the ecosystem with the outside world and the demands of regional actors to connect them with the project at European level.

How do you plan to involve local stakeholders, such as healthcare providers or policymakers, in the success of UNITE?

Local stakeholders will be involved in UNITE through a structured set of collaboration mechanisms designed to foster continuous interaction and co-creation. Local stakeholders are at the core of UNITE’s implementation and impact. Healthcare providers, policymakers, and other regional actors are actively engaged through dedicated working groups where they can share needs, challenges, and priorities, and contribute directly to the definition of use cases and actions. The project also leverages local testbeds and living labs to involve these stakeholders in real-life experimentation and validation, ensuring that solutions are aligned with regional healthcare systems and policy frameworks.

FUNDECYT-PCTEX plays a central role in coordinating these interactions at local level. As a well-established actor in the regional innovation and advanced digitalisation ecosystem, we maintain close relationships with healthcare institutions and public authorities, enabling continuous dialogue and trust-based collaboration. By translating local demands into concrete project activities and feeding back project results to regional stakeholders, we ensure their sustained involvement and ownership, which is key to the long-term success of UNITE.