Spain's private health sector isn't waiting for the EHDS. It's Already Building It.

Road to Bilbao: a conversation with Rosa Roldán, Director of Digital Strategy and Quality at Fundación IDIS.

Every Road to Bilbao conversation aims to answer one question: what does it take to make the European Health Data Space real? I expected my Real Data Better AI interview with Rosa Roldán to be about principles. It turned out to be about progress, and it changed how I see Spain's place in the EHDS story.

Rosa is a pharmacist by training. She has worked in industry and consulting, and she now leads digital strategy and quality at Fundación IDIS, the non-profit that gives voice to Spain's private healthcare sector. Its members include the large hospital groups, insurers, the socio-sanitary sector, and the tech and pharma industries. She was clear that IDIS is not an employers' association. Its purpose is better healthcare, always alongside public health, never against it.

Here is what I took from the conversation.

1. The problem isn't that private healthcare is misunderstood. It's that it's badly told.

Rosa reframed the usual debate in her first answer. People assume the private sector competes with the public one, she said. In her view, it complements the public system by adding capacity, widening access and helping respond to differences in demand, healthcare needs and regional provision.

This matters for data because the two systems hold pieces of the same people. Rosa put private-sector data at more than 20% of all health data. Patients who use both systems have records split across two worlds, and any picture built from only one of them is incomplete.

2. A health data space that leaves out private data isn't representative

This was Rosa's central message, and I think it's the strongest one for Bilbao. We can't build a European Health Data Space, or any complete national one, unless it is representative, and that means including what the private sector generates.

She noted that the Regulation applies to both public and private health data holders. It places them all under one framework of rights, obligations, interoperability, and security. So for Rosa, private-sector participation isn't a favour. It is a requirement, and it applies to both dimensions of the EHDS. Primary use needs complete data for continuity of care and patient access. Secondary use needs it for research and innovation. She also argued that private providers should be at the table from the design phase, on models, governance and interoperability, and shouldn't join at the end as one more data supplier.

3. Private healthcare has a potential structural advantage

I asked which Spanish regions are furthest ahead. Rosa named Catalonia, the Basque Country and Cantabria among the public-sector leaders, then pointed to something the private sector has. Private healthcare has a potential structural advantage: several major groups operate across regions and can therefore promote common models and consolidate information at national level more easily.

4. The real discovery: they've already built two things the EHDS will need

MiHC, an interoperable medical record platform for private healthcare, built for primary use of health data. Launched in 2023, it lets patients share their records across different hospital groups and insurers. It is patient-centred: patients decide what to share and with whom. Rosa reported more than one million sign-ups and over three million accesses. It began by exchanging reports, and this year it added medical images. A patient can have an MRI in one group, go to another, and their doctor can see both the report and the image.

The Private Healthcare Data Space (EDSP), funded through NextGenerationEU support from the Ministry of Digital Transformation. Its development was completed and the platform was officially launched in July 2026. IDIS is now incorporating data catalogues so that, subject to the applicable authorisation procedures and secure-access conditions, eligible researchers can discover and request access to private-sector datasets.

The two projects connect. MiHC gave IDIS the federated experience across competing hospital groups that made the data-space application credible. And with both in place, IDIS is already working on the patient summary and the secondary-use data catalogues that the EHDS will make mandatory by 2029. Rosa called the regulation a golden opportunity that IDIS couldn't let pass.

5. Regulation is now the bottleneck, not ambition

Rosa was candid about what comes next. Conversations with regional governments and the Ministry of Health are already happening, and they are, in her words, watching IDIS's work closely. But the formal links depend on the health data access bodies becoming operational and on a national digital health law that transposes the EHDS. Until then, she said, it is working groups, small pilots and sandboxes. The public-private collaboration itself, she stressed, isn't the problem.

What this means for Bilbao

In Bilbao (24–25 September), we will focus on the challenges of genomics and medical imaging, and Rosa's answers showed the private sector already has one foot in each. Imaging is live in MiHC. On genomics, she described hospital groups and insurers already offering patients a genetic map, focused on findings where prevention or treatment can make a difference. She sees insurers as an equal beneficiary of the EHDS, because society increasingly wants to know before something happens.

When I asked what she hopes Bilbao produces, her answer was the one I keep coming back to: the challenge isn't making data available. Everyone will do that. The challenge is turning it into useful knowledge, within a framework of trust.

That's the question we'll be working on together on 24 and 25 September. Rosa will be there, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the room answers it.

Watch the full interview (in Spanish) from the Real Data Better AI series and join us in Bilbao for the Health Data Forum Global Hybrid Summit 2026.