More information about the structure of d.hip – the four elements
d.hip Projekt – digital health twin
A main focus of our platform is dedicated to clinical prediction models for prevention, diagnosis, therapy and aftercare, which are based on structured analyses and interpretations of various types of data. Among many others, these data include medical images, genetic information, laboratory evaluations, vital signs information from mobile apps or wearable devices. Through the individual assessment of a patient’s situation not only in direct comparison with existing, relevant and documented data but additionally with each patient’s own data collected over the course of his or her life, clinical statements become much more accurate, precise and personalized.
This platform-based application is our so-called Digital Health Twin. We are thus replicating and building in the medium term what will successively be a holistic individual digital model or the Digital Patient (Digital Health Twin).
The digital likeness of an individual patient updates itself with each new exam, comparing it both with relevant clinical data and with its own younger self. Therefore, the journey of our patient data begins with documentation not only as a “sick person”, but from several previous screening and prevention appointments that allow us to capture and recording the “healthy or symptom-free person”.
Responsible handling of clinical data is an absolute priority. This is why the implementation of our project requires close cooperation and collaboration between physicians, clinicians, IT and cybersecurity specialists and product developers, as well as fundamental and intensive coordination with data protection officers and ethics committees.
As part of the framework of this development, we are primarily focusing on two selected clinical application areas: rheumatic diseases and breast health.
The greatest potential of our Digital Health Twin is to detect pathological developments earlier and counteract them accordingly before they manifest when therapy would become less promising but still more costly. Multimodal data types will not only be available in a more structured way but will also be interpreted across sectoral boundaries and incorporated into patient-specific models. As a result, therapeutic strategies will also be tailored to personalized care. However, many insights will only become apparent when different factors influencing disease progression can be recorded and their effects on clinically measurable data can be correlated. This requires high-quality processed data on the one hand and strong machine learning algorithms on the other. These are structures such as those available at our d.hip!
d.hip data center
The availability of clinical data is essential for health research to develop efficient methods to achieve the best predictions for diagnoses and therapies.
The d.hip digital health data center supports translational research in medical data science. It provides state-of-the-art hardware and software infrastructure and semantic augmentation of multisectional clinical datasets, with a focus on medical imaging for selected innovative collaborative projects. d.hip is embedded in the University Hospital Erlangen facilitating a close cooperation with the Data Integration Center (Datenintegrationszentrum – DIZ) as well as the local trust center (Treuhandstelle – THS). This takes place under complete process integration of the standardized governance requirements of the nationwide Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) with regard to data handling.
The modern hardware and software infrastructure enables a fully digitized project cycle from project coordination and management, data handling and semantic processing, to the use of latest GPU technologies for development and validation of innovative artificial intelligence approaches in Medical data science. At the d.hip data center, an interdisciplinary and diverse team consisting of clinician scientists and medical data scientists works in close collaboration and coordination with the project leaders of the collaboration project. This accelerates the translation of promising scientific research approaches into clinical evaluation.
In addition, the d.hip data center acts as a think tank to develop the clinical-scientific and translational framework for the main research project of the d.hip, the “d.hip Project- The Digital Health Twin”.
d.hip Center
In our d.hip premises (former showroom of Siemens Healthineers) at Henkestr. 127, Erlangen, Germany, interest groups who are interested in the latest developments in Digital Health meet regularly – as the current situation permits. Start-ups, companies, researchers, clinicians, ethicists and economists come together with us to network or simply get informed.
If you are also interested in hosting conferences, hackathons, or co-creation sessions, please feel free to email us. We look forward to include you in our community. In addition to our event space, we also have a makerspace, co-working spaces, and well-equipped meeting rooms. Please find more information here.
d.hip Campus
As part of our close collaboration with our partners, we are proud to significantly increase our staff capacity at FAU. We are looking forward to four new colleagues coming to Erlangen as W1 professors, all of them working in the field of Digital Health. In addition, we offer a total of 11 PhD fellowship positions, whose scientific basis is also the handling of multisectoral clinical data.