In November 2015 the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF) has announced the “Medical Informatics Funding Scheme” (Medizininformatik-Initiative, MI-I), to foster IT innovations for healthcare research and medical care. The goal is to take advantage of digitalization in medicine, to link data and generate medical knowledge, and to develop and apply innovative IT solutions for a better, data-based healthcare delivery system.
MIRACUM – this is ten universities with ten university hospitals, two universities of applied sciences and one industrial partner spread over seven German states. MIRACUM (Medical Informatics in Research and Care in University Medicine), as one of four consortia, receives funding of €37 Mio from BMBF to implement the envisaged projects. The spotlight is here on the data integration centres that will be embedded in the hospital IT-infrastructure and will facilitate the collection and exchange of data within the consortia university hospitals. Three use cases shall prove the effectivity of the innovative infrastructure with direct and prompt improvement of patient care. Data protection and data security are given top priority in this venture. Further we will elaborate a programme for strengthening medical informatics by extending the academic offer, including new professorships in the field of medical informatics, a novel, innovative master programme and personnel training.
The MIRACUM partners have agreed to share data, based on interoperable data integration centres, develop common and interoperable tools and services, realize the power of such data and tools in innovative IT solutions, which shall enhance patient-centred collaborative research as well as clinical care processes, and finally to strengthen biomedical informatics in research, teaching and continued education.