Why are you involved in the NUM?

With my work, I would like to make a contribution to improving medical research and care and cooperation between the various healthcare stakeholders. The successes and established structures from ongoing or completed NUM or Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) projects (e.g. development of a central data platform in NUM-RDP or development of a feasibility portal (FDPG) as part of the MII) show the enormous potential of this area.

Where do you see the greatest opportunities if all university hospitals conduct joint research?

The locations are no longer left to their own devices, but can benefit from already established structures and developments and, on the other hand, contribute their expertise on specific areas/topics to the network. In particular, the Data Integration Centres addressed in the NUM-DIC project offer enormous added value for all researchers, political decision-makers or the interested public through the decentralised or centralised consolidation of high-quality medical data or the provision of aggregated medical information.

Tell us a technical term from your job that sounds exciting and that only the real experts understand! What does the term mean?

It's not that easy 😉 In most cases, you are too much in a bubble in your own working world to really be able to name such a "technical term". For laypeople, however, the term Data Integration Centres is often already a very abstract term, so it may be useful to briefly describe this term in more detail: Data Integration Centres are facilities at hospitals that have so far made it their task to bring together and process patient data from routine clinical care in a standardised way, taking into account data quality and data protection, so that it can be used optimally in care and research across all sites.

What excites you about your job?

I could list a few points here, but in order not to go beyond the scope of this interview, I would like to emphasise the following two points:

• Working in a field that is quite dynamic and full of opportunities. You really learn something new almost every day.
• The collaboration with so many different professional groups or stakeholders (e.g. doctors, nurses, patients, computer scientists or statisticians) who are spread all over Germany.