International Exchange in the SMITH Consortium | Meeting of the External Advisory Board
When it comes to building IT infrastructures for medical research and health care, it pays to look beyond one’s own nose and the borders of Germany. Exchange with international experts can provide valuable impetus for project implementation and compliance with international standards.
The External Advisory Board (EAB) consists of five international experts from the fields of medicine, IT, health care and social sciences.
To get an overview of the challenges and goals of the consolidation and extension phase of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), the EAB members met with other project members of the SMITH Consortium in a web meeting on 19 June. The main topics of the meeting were the results of the previous funding period as well as the new structures and use cases of the current funding phase.
International exchange essential for further development of IT infrastructure
Professor André Scherag, 1st Speaker of the SMITH Consortium, kicked off the event by giving EAB members an insight into the new governance of the second funding phase of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). The focus of the current funding period is now increasingly on cross-consortium clinical and methodological use cases to demonstrate the functionality and benefits of the MII infrastructure. One of the new features of the MII’s expansion and extension phase is the inclusion of other initiatives and stakeholders in the data exchange, including the Network of University Medicine (NUM).
The EAB meeting also took a brief look at the results of the previous funding phase. Among other things, Dr Thomas Wendt, head of the Leipzig Data Integration Centre, presented the German Portal for Medical Research Data (FDPG). Since mid-May, the FDPG has also been open to researchers and interested parties outside the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). Scientists can use this portal to apply for data and biospecimens for their research projects.
After a summary of the past funding period, the main part of the discussion was dedicated to the new use cases GeMTeX and INTERPOLAR. In GeMTeX, clinical documents from routine care are made available for research. INTERPOLAR, a follow-up project to the cross-consortium use case POLAR, aims to improve drug safety by automatically identifying patients at high risk of drug interactions using an algorithm.
The members of the External Advisory Board highlighted the strong involvement of clinicians in the POLAR and INTERPOLAR use cases. However, semantic interoperability between hospitals and the handling of unstructured data still pose many challenges that need to be addressed. “There is still a lot to learn, also and especially together with other countries,” emphasised Professor Markus Löffler in the subsequent discussion.
New members of the SMITH External Advisory Board
The meeting also welcomed two new Advisory Board members: Professor Dipak Kalra and Professor John Mantas (Emeritus).
Professor Dipak Kalra is President of the European Institute for Innovation through Health Data (i~HD) and Professor of Health Informatics at University College London. Internationally, he is involved in the development and implementation of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). This includes the development of EHR structures, systems and guidelines, such as the development of CEN and ISO standards for interoperability. In this context, he also focuses on security and privacy standards. Professor Kalra’s current projects focus on the quality, interoperability and reusability of health data for research.
The second new member of the External Advisory Board is Professor John Mantas, Professor Emeritus of Health Informatics at the University of Athens. His current research interests are health information systems, patient safety, medical informatics and health management. He has worked for many years as a consultant and expert to the European Commission and has led numerous European initiatives in medical informatics education, including the first European Masters in Medical Informatics funded by the ERASMUS programme. He is also a co-author of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) Recommendations for Biomedical and Health Informatics Education. He currently chairs the Accreditation and Certification Committee of the European Federation of Medical Informatics (EFMI).
The next EAB meeting will take place in December 2023. For more information on the External Advisory Board, see SMITH | External Advisory Board.