Interdisciplinary use of health data

Increasingly large amounts of data are being generated in the health care system. In inpatient care, some initiatives are already pushing for the development and utilisation of this data; however, data-based research on outpatient care has so far received little attention. New, interdisciplinary competences are required in order to be able to handle data appropriately in this area too. For around a year now, these have been bundled in the project "DIM.RUHR: Data Competence Centre for the Interprofessional Use of Health Data in the Ruhr Metropolis", funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). After a successful start, the project is now entering the next phase.

Over the past few months, scientists from Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H), Ruhr University Bochum, the University of Health, Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Fraunhofer ISST, ORCA.nrw and the ZB MED Life Sciences Information Centre have developed a comprehensive concept to strengthen interprofessional data competence in outpatient care and to make this data usable for research. In the second phase of the project, which is now beginning, the theoretically outlined plans and measures will be put into practice: Among other things, the research team will initiate teaching, research and networking opportunities aimed at increasing the data literacy of care providers and researchers and improving the quality of data generation, storage, dissemination and use.

Develop customised offers that address the needs of teaching, research and practice

"A professional understanding of how to handle healthcare-related data is crucial in order to make outpatient care more efficient and effective in the long term," says Prof Dr Sven Meister, Chair of Health Informatics at the UW/H. "It is important to us to develop application-oriented programmes at DIM.RUHR that meet the needs of people in healthcare research."

In order to practise concrete applications and promote the networking of research, care and practice, experimental spaces are to be created in which students can try out data-generating systems and work with existing data sets. The "HealthDataRepository.RUHR" also makes the resulting data accessible for healthcare-related research questions.

About the project

The project "DIM.RUHR: Data competence centre for the interprofessional use of health data in the Ruhr metropolis" involves the Witten/Herdecke University, the Ruhr University Bochum, ORCA.nrw, the Bochum University of Health, the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering and the ZB MED Information Centre for Life Sciences. In addition, DIM.RUHR networks with national structures such as the Medical Informatics Initiative, GAIA-X and the Health Research Data Centre. It is funded by the BMBF under the funding code: 16DKZ2008A - DIM-RUHR. Further information can be found on the project page.