Five questions for Uniklinikum Erlangen – TEAM-X consortium partner

Why are you involved in TEAM-X as a consortium partner?
As a university hospital, we are a maximum-care hospital that focuses strongly on research and teaching as well as scientific and medical progress in addition to the tasks of patient care. As a consortium partner, we can therefore contribute our daily experience of patient care, particularly with regard to the ever-increasing complexity and volume of medical data from both clinical routine and medical research.

What is your task?
On the one hand, the clinical use cases in the fields of nursing and medicine (prototypically women’s health and palliative medicine) are defined clinically, technically and in terms of application and implemented or validated as part of clinical trial studies. At the same time, the agile TEAM X incubator, led by the Institute of Radiology, is establishing and supporting a new type of platform for health-related value-added service concepts integrated into the University Hospital Erlangen with connectivity to the Gaia-X ecosystem.

What are the biggest challenges?
A major project like TEAM-X always brings with it exciting challenges. Currently, the development processes on the technical side of Gaia-X are certainly worth mentioning. As the Gaia-X framework is still undergoing dynamic development, the stringent integration into specific implementation structures in the use cases is still a challenge for the technical partners in the consortium.

What are the benefits of a Gaia-X compliant data room?
In future, a Gaia-X-compliant data room could help to make medical data available for medical research via digital structures on the basis of patients’ sovereign decisions. This could strengthen the gain of knowledge and evidence in major medical research questions and facilitate cooperation in the field. The availability of cross-sectoral medical data in the complex care pathways of clinical routine could also strengthen healthcare.

What inspires you about Gaia-X?
Gaia-X opens up the prospect of a possible holistic solution for the handling and use of medical data. To date, there is no fully established, trustworthy procedure for managing medical data in this way and making it accessible while preserving patient data sovereignty. A great potential for medical research, but also for the personalized treatment of patients, currently remains untapped due to a lack of competent digital infrastructure. Gaia-X offers a platform that could contribute to such a competent infrastructure in the future.