Project Objectives DISTANCE
Improving Regional Patient Care through Digital Solutions
Making patient care more precise, integrative and sustainable
In the DISTANCE project, for the first time, structured, longitudinal patient data is captured digitally and made available to all healthcare providers across sectors. Artificial intelligence will help to identify risks and deterioration trends at an early stage and to predict disease progression more accurately after intensive medical treatment. Clinical conditions and treatment processes are optimized in a sustainable manner. To generate longitudinal data trends, data is collected from acute intensive care and the subsequent rehabilitation phase. Starting with admission to the hospital, health status is documented up to one year after discharge. Patients enter their health-related data into the PICOS App themselves.
Leverage routine care data across facilities and sectors
The Digital Hub DISTANCE connects regional healthcare providers such as doctors’ offices and hospitals with the existing MII infrastructure. The goal is to make routine data from regional care available for research in an anonymized form and across sectors. To this end, a scalable, cross-sector and interoperable infrastructure will be created that connects regional service providers and university institutions. This not only demonstrates the feasibility, but also the concrete added value for medical research and care.
Supporting patients’ medical self-care with the PICOS App
After a long stay in the ICU, Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS) often leads to physical, mental and emotional limitations in quality of life. The PICOS App supports former intensive care patients in health-related self-care after discharge from hospital. With the help of the app, users can regularly document their health-related well-being. This continuous data provides patients and their physicians with a comprehensive overview of their current health status. This longitudinal data is of great and lasting importance for clinical research as well as for the improvement of clinical conditions and treatment processes.
Sustainability by leveraging existing structures
DISTANCE optimizes both regional patient care and the integration of medical data into the core data set of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). The MII has created the technical basis for a digital infrastructure that networks previously unused patient data from routine care throughout Germany and makes it available for medical research. This will enable faster and more effective treatment of diseases in the future. The DISTANCE project is now testing the rollout of the technical MII concept to regional hospitals and outpatient physician networks.
