A Look into the Data Integration Centers: Secure Research with the Data Integration Center Hamburg
In the new SMITH news series “A Look into the Data Integration Centers”, a Data Integration Center established within the SMITH Consortium of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) will be presented on a monthly basis. The Data Integration Centers, which were initially established at university medical centers, create the conditions for secure and privacy-compliant access to high-quality data from routine care.
In this part of our series, the team at the Hamburg Data Integration Center explains what it offers to researchers at its location and how the Data Integration Center plans to develop in the future.
How is the Hamburg Data Integration Center structured?
The Hamburg Data Integration Center is part of the Information Technology Division (GB IT) at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE). Organizationally, it belongs to the “Research and Integrative Systems” (FIS) department but operates as an independent unit under this umbrella, with its own rules of procedure.
The FIS department is funded by:
• GB IT,
• the Dean’s Office,
• third-party projects such as the Medical Informatics Initiative and the Network University Medicine (NUM).
The interdisciplinary FIS team, consisting of more than 20 members, works closely with various research and healthcare units at UKE.
What services do you offer to researchers?
Our primary focus is on the structured processing and provision of data. This includes, among other things, the backend of our secure research environment, which we operate jointly with the Institute for Applied Medical Informatics under the leadership of Prof. Dr. Frank Ückert.
Additional services provided by the FIS department include:
• an electronic case report form (eCRF) based on REDCap,
• trust agency functions,
• sample management software, and
• IT support for selected infrastructure topics, such as the development of UKE’s new research building Campus Forschung II.
What are you currently working on?
The Data Integration Center is continuously integrating new data sources, harmonizing them, and making them available for research projects. In parallel, the FIS team is working intensively on expanding central research services, which have gained significant importance in recent years. An upcoming milestone is the launch of an electronic lab notebook, which will soon be ready for productive use.
Other key areas include supporting clinical studies and building powerful research infrastructures—such as storage solutions, computing resources (CPUs, GPUs), and specialized virtual environments.
Since 2018, the university medical sites of the Medical Informatics Initiative have been setting up Data Integration Centers funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). In 2023, the Data Integration Centers of the university hospitals were integrated into the Network of University Medicine. Since then, they have been funded by the BMBF as part of the NUM, but continue to be managed by the MII.