Consortia

Cross-institutional data integration and sharing will be vital to tomorrow’s medicine. DIFUTURE aims to provide medical professionals and researchers with data of comprehensive depth and breadth – to improve healthcare processes, accelerate innovation, and achieve tangible benefits for patients.

DIFUTURE comprises three German Universities of Excellence and their affiliated hospitals, plus additional clinical partners. The result is a unique synthesis of knowledge from the fields of medicine, informatics, biostatistics and bioinformatics. The consortium’s international connections are a further strength.

The consortium HiGHmed unites and integrates competences of eight university hospitals and medical faculties as well as further scientific and business partners in order to develop innovative information infrastructures. Thus, the translation of research findings into clinical practice shall be accelerated.

MIRACUM unites ten university hospitals, two universities, and a partner from the healthcare industry, from seven German states. Its goal is to make clinical, image and molecular/genomic data available for use in innovative research projects – both within and across multiple institutions, via modular, scalable and federated data integration centres (DICs). These DICs provide an opportunity to conduct feasibility and observation studies, and evaluate real-world pathways on a large scale. MIRACUM will also support the recruitment of patients for clinical studies, the development of predictive models, and precision medicine. In an effort to strengthen biomedical informatics and medical data science, ten new professorships have already been advertised at the MIRACUM sites, with additional positions to follow. It will also set up a joint, multi-site master’s programme on biomedical informatics and medical data science.

In the SMITH medical informatics consortium, more than 300 clinical, epidemiological and systems medicine employees are working to link research and healthcare systematically for the first time. For this purpose, the data generated daily in routine care are processed with the patients’ consent and made available to medical research in a standardized form. This enables researchers to better understand and analyse healthcare processes. Patients benefit from reliable research results, more precise diagnoses and better treatments.

The prerequisites for linking healthcare data with research data are new technical interfaces between healthcare and biomedical research at clinical sites. To this end, the 19 consortium partners are jointly establishing a data architecture that enables interoperable data use from patient care and research across the boundaries of institutions and sites. Within this framework, the university hospitals participating in the consortium have established sustainable data integration centers (DIC) in Aachen, Bonn, Essen, Halle, Hamburg, Jena and Leipzig. The network partners Ruhr University Bochum, the Düsseldorf University Hospital and the University Medical Center Rostock are preparing to establish a DIC.

The consortium demonstrates the functionality and added value of intelligent and responsible data use through one methodological use case and two clinical use cases in the areas of intensive care and infectious medicine.

The consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) have established data integration centres (DIC) at their university medical sites. In these new facilities, data from healthcare and research of a university hospital are collected, whereby data quality and data protection are essential.

The DIC is usually an institution within the hospital and is generally closely linked to the clinical IT units, thus ensuring a close connection to the systems of patient care. The tasks of the DIC include the transfer of data from a wide range of data-providing systems, the integration and processing of this data, and ensuring data quality and data protection. The processed data is then made available for use in medical research and research results are fed back into the health care system via the DIC.

The DIC thus create the technical and organisational prerequisites for data use processes between patient care and medical research across multiple sites. The DIC thus enable medical data to be recorded, integrated and exchanged in such a way that they can be used effectively in health care and research – even repeatedly. Standardisation, reusability and interoperability of data are key factors here. In the future, researchers should be able to use harmonised data from all German university hospitals with a single query within a uniform legal framework. The DIC will be maintained as a permanent, sustainable infrastructure, thus improving digital, targeted health care and preparing the federal research system for the future.