Core Unit Digital Medicine and Interoperability

Further information

• Data protection and data security

  Data protection and data security are prerequisites for data use in medical care and research. This ensures the integrity and availability of sensitive patient data. The Core Facility Digital Medicine and Interoperability deals not only with organizational and technical aspects of data use, but also with ethical, legal, and social issues that influence each other. The leading paradigm is to keep data at the responsible institution. Information must be in the right place at the right time with the right people. For example, data should not be brought to AI algorithms, but AI algorithms should be brought to the data. The focus is on methods of decentralized analysis and cryptographic procedures, such as Secure Multi Party Computation (SMPC). These methods avoid the transfer of sensitive clinical and genetic data between parties, as defined in Article 9 of the General Data Protection Regulation. In the field of rare diseases in particular, the linking of data sets is intended to achieve both horizontal expansion (more patients) and vertical supplementation (including external longitudinal data). 

  The Berlin Hospital Act will be converted into a new law that allows data processing to improve patient outcomes and enable appropriate (health) data science.

• Digital medicine and ethics

  To this day, certain aspects of digital medicine that relate to digital illiteracy and unequal access to healthcare remain a challenge. In order to share information truthfully with end users, informed consent and fairness are required when it comes to the storage, access, sharing, and ownership of data. It is now up to stakeholders, particularly digital health providers and regulators, to design digital health innovations with an ethical and equitable approach. We must leverage this change to create an equitable approach to digital health and promote health equity around the world. It should be a fundamental right that new technologies created by digital medicine are available to everyone, including underprivileged groups and communities. Digital medicine should equally promote innovation and the democratization of healthcare. Ethical concerns, particularly regarding the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in healthcare, should be carefully considered in this context.

• Diversity

  We work actively to achieve gender equality, diversity, and inclusion in digital medicine. We place great importance on closing data gaps, avoiding data biases, and promoting diversity by, among other things, raising awareness of the importance of these issues on international stages. We are also involved in the GMDS Diversity Project Group, an initiative that emerged from the AG Thun.