Visit to the Data Integration Center
On December 5, Dr. Katja Pähle, chairwoman of the Saxony-Anhalt SPD parliamentary group, and Falko Grube, member of the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament and chair of the SPD's Committee on Infrastructure, visited the Data Integration Center (DIZ) at Magdeburg University Medical Hospital.
Prof. Dr. Hans-Jochen Heinze, Medical Director of Magdeburg University Hospital, and the Dean of the Medical Faculty Prof. Dr. Daniela Dieterich welcomed the two guests and took them on a short tour together with Dr. Tim Herrmann, operational managing director of the DIZ.
The Data Integration Center (DIZ) was established as one of four consortia of the nationwide Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) at the Magdeburg site as part of the MIRACUM project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and officially opened in 2019. This data integration center will be operated by the IT and Medical Technology (ITMT) department of Magdeburg University Hospital A.ö.R. and by the Institute of Biometry and Medical Informatics as part of the Medical Faculty of Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg. The aim is to link the growing volumes of data - from radiological images to molecular analyses - in a national infrastructure in order to gain new knowledge for better health research and medical care.
Photo: (from left) Falko Grube, Member of the Saxony-Anhalt State Parliament and Chairman of the SPD Committee on Infrastructure, Dr. Katja Pähle, Chair of the Saxony-Anhalt SPD State Parliamentary Group, Dr. Tim Herrmann, Operational Managing Director of the DIZ, Prof. Dr. Daniela Dieterich, Dean of the Medical Faculty, Prof. Dr. Hans-Jochen Heinze, Medical Director of Magdeburg University Hospital at the Data Integration Center of Magdeburg University Medical Center. Photographer: Sarah Kossmann/ UMMD
"We are now very well networked thanks to Prof. Bernarding, Dr. Tim Herrmann and the DIZ team and depend on the medical informatics initiative to continue. When you look at university medicine in the context of the hospital landscape, not only in Saxony-Anhalt but also at the national level, networking is very important because it also provides security," says the dean.
Prof. Heinze also expressed his sincere thanks for the work that has been done so far and said: "The future of Unimedicine moves in two strands. Colleagues are bringing together the many research data we generate every day with clinical data. An ever-increasing number of parameters flow with imaging and other data into a very complicated pattern. The essential task of the DIZ is to convert the clinical data into research formats in such a way that data security is guaranteed and interfaces are available so that people can use them easily. We need digitization at University Medicine so that the approaches we have developed can be implemented in daily work."
In the subsequent presentation, Dr. Tim Herrmann introduced the DIZ of the University Medical Center and gave an overview of some current data projects as well as an insight into developing potentials, also for the digital care projects currently being planned by the Medical Directorate in the north of Saxony-Anhalt.
"The expansion of university medicine in the direction of a modern, fully digitized research landscape, which can cooperate uniformly across all federal states, will play a decisive role in the future of Germany as a center of science," said Dr. Herrmann.