Clinical Data Reuse – Promises or Problems?

Program

Welcome
Yana Yoncheva, IB Digital Health Nation & Dr. Gundula Heinatz Bürki, IB Databooster

Clinical Data Reuse – Promises or Problems? by Prof. Dr. Thomas Bürkle, Applied University of Bern, Professor for medical informatics

This part of the webinar will introduce in the topic of clinical data reuse with examples from large hospital environments e.g. integrating routine data into cancer registry or for research purposes and using genetic data for drug therapy decision support.
On a technical level, the tasks of integration and interoperability on technical, semantical and workflow level will be discussed and a critical retrospective of achievements and drawbacks will be presented.

Thomas Bürkle joined Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) as a professor for medical informatics in 2014. He teaches various medical informatics and interoperability subjects in Bachelor and Master level in Biel/Bienne and Zurich. His research interests include clinical decision support, information processing in intensive care, data reuse, workflow support and evaluation of healthcare IT. He was or is responsible for the research projects “Spital der Zukunft” and “Digi-care” (BFH-part).

Health Data Repository for Data Driven Clinical Research by Dr. Sebastiano Caprara, Balgrist University Hospital, Lead Digital Medical Unit

A paradigm shift toward electronic health records, and extension of these to include clinical research
datasets, is rapidly gaining momentum but requires effective interlinking of patient data. The main goal of the Health Data Repository – HDR – project is to develop a digital platform at the Balgrist University Hospital that can be modularly integrated in the flow of medical and research data within a hospital local digital environment, focusing on structured clinical data and research cohorts. The first step of our data integration approach aims at data harmonization between the hospital and its different departments. The HDR API (Application Programming Interface) layer is able to connect to multiple clinical IT systems, extract relevant data, map it to a target standard, and de-identify the data for research purposes. When queried from clinical systems, the data is mapped to standardized models, aligning it with ongoing national and international efforts in terms of terminology.
We aim to leverage standard data models and ontologies to improve research quality and facilitate academic collaborations, but we are also preparing the clinical IT infrastructure to facilitate the integration of innovative digital tools and data-driven medicine results in daily clinical processes.

Dr. Sebastiano Caprara received his PhD degree at the ETH Zurich with focus on machine learning and predictive models providing solutions for preoperative planning of spinal fusion surgery. He is currently leading the Health Data Repository project at the Balgrist University Hospital and establishing the Digital Medicine Unit. He is part of the digitalSwitzerland initiative representing Balgrist in the Digital Health Committee.

Q&A and Closing