SMITH Online Closed Meeting | February 2022
On February 22nd and 23th, the first closed meeting of this year took place as an online conference. The central topic was the preparation of the application for the consolidation and further development phase of the Medical Informatics Initiative from 2023. 117 participants discussed the progress of the project in the SMTIH Consortium and the planned work in the next funding period.
In the consolidation and further development phase, the main focus will be on enhanced collaboration between the participants in the Medical Informatics Initiative. This concerns both interoperability between university hospitals with the aim of sharing health-related data across sites, and the rollout of successful solutions within the consortium. In the upcoming funding period, new cross-consortium use cases will also demonstrate the added value of Data Integration Centers (DIC). DIC are intended to be permanently embedded in research and clinical settings as a sustainable health IT infrastructure over the long term.
During the closed meeting, Prof. Dr. Markus Löffler, head of the SMITH Consortium, reported on a very constructive discussion with the hospital boards and deans of the DIC sites, in which the boards and deans were asked for a sustainability commitment for the DIC starting in 2027. “It was extremely gratifying for us to receive positive feedback for the continued existence of our DIC sites and thus the IT infrastructures we have created,” said Professor Löffler. The project partners reaffirm this commitment via Letters of Support, which will be attached to the grant application for the upcoming project phase.
Other topics discussed at the SMITH closed meeting included ongoing preparations for the 2022 SMITH Congress, implementation of informed Broad Consent at university medical sites, and making the DIC productive.
The next SMITH Closed Meeting is scheduled for May 18-19, 2022, and is expected to be held in a face-to-face format at Friedrich Schiller University Jena.