ABIDE_MI

Aligning Biobanking and DIC Efficiently

The use case “Aligning Biobanking and DIC Efficiently” (ABIDE_MI) is a collaborative project involving the majority of German university hospitals in the four consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). The aim of the project, which started in May 2021, is for the data integration centers (DIC) of the MII to be able to link patient data from routine care with data on biospecimens and make it usable for research. In particular, researchers will be able to submit feasibility queries via the MII’s future German Portal for Medical Research Data for Health.

 

Goals of ABIDE_MI

The project, funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining the achievements and experience of the MII, the German Biobank Node (GBN) and the biobanks of the German Biobank Alliance (GBA) in a sustainable health IT infrastructure: the MII’s German Portal for Medical Research Data.

The project will enable future close collaboration between biobanks and DIC at 24 sites of German university medicine, both on a technical and regulatory level.

This is based on

  1. the development of methods that enable MII DIC to link patient data with selected information on associated biospecimens collected in the context of patient care (i.e., excluding clinical trials, research consortia, and cohorts) by university hospitals and available in the associated biobanks.
  2. the establishment of a central FHIR-based, MII-wide (feasibility) query and analysis tool of the German Research Data Portal for Health. This should
    • identify patient groups with appropriate biospecimens suitable for a given research project, and
    • distributed data analyses across all participating university hospitals.
  3. the development of software tools and their easy dissemination via software containers also to newly added MII sites, so that a fast and easy expansion of the network is possible in the future.
  4. The development of a scalable infrastructure that will allow seamless connection of the MII-DIC to the European BBMRI-ERIC Common Service IT portal for the management of healthcare biospecimens.

MIRACUM project partners

  • Technical University Dresden
  • University Hospital Frankfurt am Main
  • University Hospital Freiburg
  • University Hospital Gießen
  • University Hospital Mannheim

Publications

  • Prokosch HU et al. – Aligning Biobanks and Data Integration Centers Efficiently (ABIDE_MI)

Further Information

MII Website – ABIDE_MI