The 2017 TMF School focused on the ideas at the heart of the Medical Informatics Initiative

22 June 2017. TMF School 2017, from 19 to 21 June in Schloss Rauischholzhausen near Giessen, Germany, highlighted a variety of topics  – chosen, in part, to reflect the ideas behind the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s (BMBF) Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). These ranged from IT architecture to data management, standards and terminology, data protection and ethics, and dialogue with stakeholders. The initiative’s consortia are currently preparing for the start of the second phase of funding (development and networking phase).

The goal of medical research is first and foremost to turn results into tangible benefits for patient care. But extracting value from diverse data from research and healthcare requires many things – planning IT architectures, implementing effective data management, standardising information from multiple sources, adding standardised metadata, and enabling easy retrieval of stored data. The trend towards the generation and use of extremely large volumes of data (i.e. big data) makes it all the more important to engage in dialogue with patients, interested citizens, the media, politicians, and other stakeholders – and to develop strategies for participation. With this in mind, TMF School 2017 specifically addressed stakeholder dialogue and participation for the first time.

full report on the TMF website