MIDIA-Hub

MIDIA-Hub: Better aftercare for cancer, optimised therapy against multiple sclerosis

About the project

The holistic overview of a patient’s disease history – that is the premise of the “Digital Progress Hub” MIDIA-Hub (MIRACUM DIFUTURE Alignment Hub).

The follow-up care of cancer patients and the treatment of people with multiple sclerosis have one thing in common: In each individual case, they provide large amounts of the most varied data – from MRI images to laboratory values, and this over many years. At the same time, a wide variety of players accompany patients on their care journeys. In order for all those treating patients to be able to make the best possible therapeutic decisions at every point in the care chain, they must have an overview of the complex overall clinical picture of their patients. Supporting this with innovative IT solutions is a central goal of the MIDIA-Hub.

---

Use Cases

Portal for physicians and patients

A key role will be played by a new physician portal that the University Hospitals of Erlangen and Munich – which also coordinate the medical informatics consortia MIRACUM and DIFUTURE – are jointly developing. Through this portal, they want to network with regional providers in their area and establish a model for the culture of data sharing. Intelligent data analytics will support the care of people while helping health research to optimize therapies and follow-up care concepts. Alongside this, a patient portal will also be established to enable people to take a more active role within their recovery process. They will have the opportunity to make their own data – for example on their well-being and state of illness – available digitally to doctors in private practice, hospital doctors, and also to health research, or to revoke this. In addition, they can track exactly how their pseudonymized data is used for which research questions – and what the results will be.

Improving cancer follow-up care

Another use case focuses on people who have or have had breast or prostate cancer. The physicians’ portal is intended to ensure that, in the future, all care providers record their data according to uniform standards and share it with each other during long-term follow-up care. On the basis of this overall picture, the treating physicians can coordinate their strategies and make the best possible decisions for each person. The standardized data will also help researchers to answer pressing questions with the help of intelligent analyses: Why, for example, does one breast cancer patient relapse but not another? Which biomarkers can make risk predictions more reliable? Which supportive therapies are proving effective, and which are not?

Optimizing therapy for people with multiple sclerosis

Multiple sclerosis is the most common neurological autoimmune disease of young adults – and it is not curable. However, there are numerous medications that can slow the progression of the disease. To make the best possible use of the therapeutic options, doctors must monitor the treatment pathways over many years and constantly adapt them to the individual course of the disease. To make this even more successful in the future, the physicians’ portal will bundle all relevant data and compile it into an overall clinical picture that those treating patients at every point in the care chain can overview and use for therapeutic decisions. In the multitude of individual disease and therapy courses of people with multiple sclerosis, researchers will also use innovative IT solutions to detect previously unknown patterns – for example, new starting points that make it possible to identify when which of the different drugs offers the most promising option for which individuals.

---

Head of the Digital Hub

---