SMITH Online Closed Meeting | November 2021

The final SMITH Consortium quarterly closed meeting of the year was held as a web conference on November 24th-25th. 117 participants came together online for two days to discuss the current project status and plan further steps. Key topics included the go-live of the Data Integration Centers (DIC) and preparations for the expansion and extension phase under the next funding period of the Medical Informatics Initiative.

“We have created the essential foundations and organizational structures at the seven Data Integration Centers to date. This is also confirmed by the positive external audit of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research,” said Prof. Dr. Markus Löffler, head of the SMITH Consortium and director of the Institute of Medical Informatics, Statistics and Epidemiology at the opening of the event. “All clinical sites of the SMITH Consortium that are in the process of establishing a DIC were rated as “well advanced or advanced.” This is very gratifying! However, there is still a lot of work to be done to make care data sustainably available for biomedical research.” This echoed in the report from the Data Integration Centers. The heads of the DICs, together with their colleagues from the technical project management, reported on the current implementation status of the research data infrastructure. There are still tasks that have not yet been satisfactorily implemented and that are being driven forward at full speed, they noted. A successful fulfillment of the current project plans is targeted by the end of the year.

Another focus of the SMITH retreat was the preparations for the expansion and extension phase of the Medical Informatics Initiative starting in 2023. After the development and networking phase, which was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research with a total of around 180 million euros from 2018 to 2022, the newly created IT architectures and software solutions are to be expanded and transferred to additional partners as part of a follow-up call for proposals. In a continuation of the brainstorming already started at the last closed meeting, the ideas for expanding the Data Integration Centers and establishing cross-consortium use cases for the application were concretized. The results will be incorporated into a follow-up workshop at the beginning of the year.