On December 5, the DigiMed Bayern Symposium took place at the TranslaTUM of the Technical University of Munich. Under the headline "Big Data - Big Outcome?", high-profile presentations and discussions demonstrated that the intensive use of health data can make an essential contribution to research and development in medicine and the further development of the healthcare system. The "DigiMed Bayern Secure Cloud" for health data was officially launched in the presence of an expert audience from science, business and politics. It is the jointly developed pilot infrastructure at the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
The DigiMed Bayern flagship P4 medicine project (www.digimed-bayern.de), the symposium and the DigiMed Bayern Secure Cloud offer valuable and tangible approaches for actively shaping the upcoming European Health Data Space (EHDS), for which the EU legislative process is currently underway. With the EHDS, the EU Commission wants to enable better use of health data for medical care, research and innovation as well as for health policy decisions and support individuals in taking control of their own health data. In recent years, Germany has worked its way into the European midfield in terms of digitalization in the healthcare sector. Above all, the EHDS offers great opportunities for Germany, although risks must also be highlighted. Germany should therefore take a leading position.
DigiMed Bayern focuses on advancing Germany in the responsible use of health data in scientific, medical and technical aspects. The focus is on how the widespread disease atherosclerosis and its serious consequences, heart attacks and strokes, can be prevented. To achieve this, it is initially necessary to integrate a large amount of high-quality health data. A team of experts from various disciplines analyzes this data to identify patterns that may be important in the development or progression of the disease.
Publicly funded institutions such as universities, hospitals and research institutes generate large and important volumes of data. However, important secure and cost-efficient cloud infrastructures are lacking for the use of this data. The DigiMed Bayern Secure Cloud, which was launched at the DigiMed Bayern Symposium, will not only serve DigiMed Bayern scientists from ten research institutes as a research pilot project, but will also provide and develop expertise in the field of secure cloud infrastructures "Made in Germany". This is a prerequisite for shaping the EHDS in a leading way and using it early on for the common good.
Prof. Dr. Heribert Schunkert, Scientific Director of DigiMed Bayern and Director of the Clinic for Cardiovascular Diseases at the German Heart Centre Munich, says: "In order to be able to treat diseases in a targeted manner, we need to understand the correlations in their emergence. This requires data. Integrating and analyzing this data can therefore save lives. At DigiMed Bayern, we have already achieved a lot for and with patients, for example with the Vroni study, the calculator for the risk of heart disease and the HerzFit app. Integrated data helps to map the development of disease at a molecular level. However, the spectrum of analyses extends to the macroscopic level, where the aim is to achieve improvements in the healthcare system. The availability and analysis of large and in-depth data sets from many patients will thus be able to contribute to better health at lower costs in the future. In our work, we have found that the vast majority of patients understand and support these connections."
Dr. Jens Wiehler, Managing Director of DigiMed Bayern and Digital Health Lead at BioM Biotech Cluster Development GmbH, adds: "The availability of health data and the ability to process it securely, efficiently and scalable with interdisciplinary teams of experts are a bottleneck for medical research and development. In addition to the medical-scientific successes, DigiMed Bayern is also helping to eliminate the bottleneck by developing a secure cloud environment in a public data centre. Ultimately, however, this challenge will only be solved through close cooperation with industry. This will help to improve our healthcare system and will also benefit Germany as a research and business location."