Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems EngineeringHealthcare generates a large amount of data that can be used for research into diseases, drugs and treatment methods. The use of data science and machine learning in particular offers great potential for learning from existing data volumes and optimizing medical processes and treatment methods. In order for this data from different sources to be combined and analyzed, it must have a high level of data quality, interoperability, data protection and security.
TRANSIT
Medical Informatics Structure "Data Management Unit"
The challenge
The TRANSIT project focuses on supporting the goals of the expansion and extension phase of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) by developing a data management center to strengthen synergies between patient care and medical research. The data management center integrates into the overall infrastructure of the MII and its Data Use & Access (DUA) process. The necessary activities of the preparation and application phase of the DUA process are provided by the Research Data Portal for Health (FDPG). The FDPG is a web application that provides a central user interface for researchers to create data use requests. The data use phase of the DUA process to merge and provide data to scientists is implemented here by the data management office.
Our contribution
Within the framework of TRANSIT, Fraunhofer ISST is developing a data management center for the cross-site provision of data and analysis results in the context of secondary data utilization projects. For this purpose, components and interfaces for the overarching coordination for the provision of data sets from federated data integration centers for data requesting scientists are implemented. Interactions between the FDPG, data integration centers, the data management center, and overarching services will be accomplished through a middleware component, such as the HighMed Data Sharing Framework (DSF). By operating a DSF instance, the data management center is integrated into the higher-level infrastructure. The necessary interoperability is ensured by using international standards such as HL7® FHIR®.
Results
The data management center provides necessary interfaces based on international standards for the integration and connection of all data integration centers. The scalable architecture of the data management center enables parallel operation of critical components, for example, for the transformation and archiving of data records. The data management center thus offers a tool for the automated consolidation of medical data from all data integration centers involved in the data utilization project and the provision of these data to the authorized scientists.
Partners
- HiGHmed e.V
- Healthcare IT Solutions GmbH
Funding
- Sponsor: Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF)
- Funding code: 01ZZ2313A
- Duration: 01/2023-12/2026
