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 brings together ten university hospitals, two universities and one industry partner from seven German federal states. The aim is to make clinical data, image data and data from molecular/genomic studies usable for innovative research projects both on a site-specific and cross-site basis via modular, scalable and federated data integration centers. In addition to the fundamental possibility of conducting feasibility studies, observational studies and the investigation of “real world pathways” on a large scale with such data integration centers, MIRACUM will support the recruitment of patients for clinical trials, the development of predictive models and precision medicine. In order to strengthen biomedical informatics and medical data science, ten new professorships have already been advertised at the MIRACUM sites and more will follow. In addition, a joint, cross-location Master’s degree program in “Biomedical Informatics and Medical Data Science” is to be established.

In the SMITH consortium, more than 300 clinical, epidemiological and systems medicine employees are working on linking research and care in a targeted manner. To this end, the data collected daily in routine care is processed with the consent of the patients and made available to medical research in a standardized form. This enables researchers to better understand and analyze care processes. Patients benefit from reliable research results, more precise diagnoses and better therapies.

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 the interoperable use of data from patient care and research across the boundaries of institutions and locations. With this in mind, the university hospitals participating in the consortium have established sustainable data integration centers in Aachen, Bonn, Essen, Halle, Hamburg, Jena and Leipzig. The networking partners Ruhr University Bochum, Düsseldorf University Hospital and Rostock University Hospital are preparing to set up a DIZ.

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 set up Data Integration Centers (DIZ) at their university medical sites. These new facilities collect research and healthcare data from a university hospital, with data quality and data protection playing a key role.

The DIZ is an institution within the hospital and is generally closely linked to the clinical computer centers, which ensures a close connection to the patient care systems. The tasks of the DIZ include the transfer of data from various data-providing systems, the consolidation and processing of this data as well as 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 healthcare via the DIZ.

In the DIZ, the technical and organizational prerequisites for the cross-location use of data between patient care and medical research are thus created. The DIZs thus enable medical data to be recorded, merged and exchanged in such a way that it can be used optimally in healthcare and research – even multiple times. Standardization, reusability and interchangeability of data play an important role here. In the future, researchers will be able to use harmonized data from all German university hospitals within a uniform legal framework. The DIZ will be maintained as a permanent, sustainable infrastructure and thus improve digital, targeted care and make the federal research landscape fit for the future.