In the SMITH Consortium, a network of university and university medical partners is working on linking research and healthcare in a targeted and data protection-compliant manner. The Data Integration Centers set up at the clinical sites for this purpose are the central technological interfaces. They process the healthcare data generated in everyday clinical practice and make the data available to medical research in standardized form. The prerequisite for all work is always the declaration of consent of the patients, who make a significant contribution to improving medical care by providing their data. Based on clinical and methodological use cases, SMITH tests and proves the benefit of the IT solutions developed. SMITH is one of four consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). As part of the consolidation and extension phase funded from 2023 to 2026, data-based health research is to be further expanded through cooperation with new partners, especially from the regional health care sector. The expansion of the medical informatics infrastructure will take place in close cooperation with the Network University Medicine (NUM).
Secure access to research-relevant data and algorithms across locations
Decision support for individualized patient care
Improvement and personalization of diagnostics and therapy
Enhancement of teaching and research in medical informatics
About 25 people working on the GeMTeX project met last week at the Albertina Library of Leipzig University to discuss th...
19 May, 2025 News
The GeMTeX project aims to create one of the largest corpora of German medical texts available. To this end, unstructure...
07 May, 2025 5 Questions for
In the new SMITH news series “A Look into the Data Integration Centers”, a Data Integration Center established within th...
30 April, 2025 News
The GeMTeX project aims to create one of the largest corpora of German medical texts available. To this end, unstructured texts from clinical documentation will be made accessible for research and AI applications in compliance with data protection regulations by annotation. In this interview, medical students Marie-Sophie Polifka and Sarina Shams discuss their work as annotators in Leipzig and share how the project will benefit their future careers.
Neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) currently represent a major medical challenge. Early diagnosis is crucial to slow the progression of the disease. The NDEMobil Junior Research Group at the University Hospital Bonn is researching technical solutions that enable early diagnosis and monitoring of the progression of NDDs. Read more about their work in the interview!
The FHIR Blaze server is designed to enable researchers to access medical data from multiple locations. Read an interview with Alexander Kiel, lead developer of Blaze, about what makes the server special and important to the work of the Medical Informatics Initiative.
After almost two years of preparation, the INTERPOLAR project is now entering its practical phase: in a multi-phase study, the Medication Therapy Safety (MTS) Cockpit will be implemented on 48 wards at eight university hospitals and used as a tool for medication analysis on randomly selected wards. In this interview, Prof. Dr. André Scherag, Deputy Network Coordinator, and Dr. Daniel Neumann, Scientific Project Manager at INTERPOLAR, give an insight into the background of the INTERPOLAR studies and the use of the MTS Cockpit.
To make healthcare data available for research, the SMITH Consortium has established seven Data Integration Centers. Three additional university medical partners are currently establishing a Data Integration Center, including the University Medical Center Rostock (UMR). There, Petra Gröber is responsible for the development. In the current issue of "5 Questions for..." she talks about the challenges, opportunities and future plans of the Rostock Data Integration Center.
The "BENEFIT" Junior Research Group at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) is creating the framework conditions for making healthcare data usable. Find out more in the interview with junior research group leader Dr Philipp Breitfeld!
Today is World Boss Day! We took the opportunity to talk to the head of our consortium.
In our latest "5 Questions for" interview, Roland Ihle and Anja share their findings from the HELP study.
How can clinical documents be used for automatic language processing? What are the challenges? How can clinicians and researchers use a corpus of medical texts? Christina Lohr and Luise Modersohn, research assistants in the GeMTeX project, answer these questions in an interview.
The current rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning hold great potential for optimising intensive care medicine. For example, these technologies can be used to predict the course of disease and thus prevent exacerbations. In the interview with former SMITH doctoral student Konstantin Sharafutdinov, you can learn how Virtual Patients can support the application of artificial intelligence in intensive care.
In January 2023, the POLAR follow-up project INTERPOLAR has started. On this occasion, Prof. Dr Petra Thürmann and Dr Beate Mussawy give an insight into the use case. They are experts in the field of pharmacology and pharmacy and have been supervising POLAR since the beginning of the project. In the interview, Prof. Thürmann and Dr. Mussawy explain how drug safety can be improved in the INTERPOLAR project.
Dr Irina Lutz heads one of the seven Data Integration Centers set up in SMITH so far. The graduate engineer combines technical expertise with computer science and basic clinical knowledge. At the RWTH Aachen University Hospital, Dr Lutz is responsible for the strategic planning of tasks and processes in the Data Integration Center. In the interview, she reveals the challenges and where she sees the future of the Data Integration Centers.
Christoph Beger is a junior researcher in the SMITH Junior Research Group "Terminology- and Ontology-based Phenotyping (TOP)" at the Leipzig University. We talked to Christoph Beger about what algorithmic phenotyping is and why it can optimise research with medical data and thus patient care.
The Digital Hubs funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research were launched just under a year ago. Their goal is to transfer the IT infrastructures established in the MII beyond the university medical context into regional health care. In this issue of "5 Questions for...", Prof. Dr. Marx and Dr. Molinnus give an overview of the current status of the Digital Hub DISTANCE, which is managed by the SMITH Consortium.
Prof. Dr André Scherag has been Director of the Institute for Medical Statistics, Computer and Data Sciences at Jena University Hospital since 2017. As the first speaker in the SMITH Consortium, he has been committed to the sustainable use of healthcare data in biomedical research since the beginning of the project and thus to improved patient care in the long term. For the SMITH Congress 2022, he took on the task of Congress President.
On the occasion of International Women's Day, we spoke to Dr Anke Diehl, Head of the Digital Transformation Unit and Chief Transformation Officer at the Essen University Hospital (UME). She is specifically committed to digitalisation in medical care and was recently honoured with the German Medical Award as "Medical Woman of the Year 2021". In the interview, Dr Diehl talks about women and diversity in medical informatics.