HiGHmed – Medical Informatics-Initiative Germany
HiGHmed (www.highmed.org) is a nationwide medical informatics project with the aim of improving the accessibility of medical patient data for clinical research, teaching and healthcare.
The HiGHmed consortium takes part in the national funding program “Medical Informatics Initiative (MII)” (http://www.medizininformatik-initiative.de/en/start), which was advertised in 2015 by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The funding program aims to advance digitization in medicine by facilitating the exchange and sharing of data between research institutions and healthcare providers through innovative IT solutions.
After an initial conceptual phase, the founding members of the HiGHmed consortium, the Heidelberg University Hospital, the Göttingen University Medical Center and the Hannover Medical School, received funding for the development and networking phase (2018-2022). At the start of the phase in 2018, five other university hospitals joined the project: the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the University Hospital Cologne, the University Hospital Würzburg, the University Hospital Münster and the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein. In addition, the Carl-Thiem-Klinikum Cottbus was the first hospital to be included in the HiGHmed consortium as a network partner in 2020.
To this day, the consortium bundles the know-how of 12 university clinics and medical faculties as well as other academic and industrial partners. This strong know-how was applied in prototypical clinical use cases in oncology, cardiology and infection control. Since January 1, 2023, the HiGHmed consortium has been in the consolidation and further development phase (2023-2026) of the BMBF funding program.
The MeDIC Münster actively participates in the design of the MII’s processes and solutions and in the working groups of the national steering committee, especially in the working group “Data sharing”.
Contact: Dr. Michael Storck, Sarah Riepenhausen, Physician
Principal investigator: Univ.-Prof. Julian Varghese
Project number: 01ZZ1802V, 01ZZ2302H