The »Aligning Biobanking and DIC Efficiently« (ABIDE_MI) use case is a joint project involving the majority of German University Medical Centers in the four consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). The project’s aim, launched in May 2021, is to enable the data integration centers (DIC) to link patient data from routine care with data on biospecimens and make it usable for research. In particular, researchers should be able to submit feasibility queries via the MII’s future German Research Data Portal for Health. The ABIDE_MI project runs until June 2023.
The project, funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Funding Code: 01ZZ2061V), pursues an interdisciplinary approach in which the achievements and experience of the MII, the German Biobank Node (GBN), and the biobanks of the German Biobank Alliance (GBA) are combined in a sustainable health IT infrastructure: the MII’sGerman Research Data Portal for Health.
The project will enable future close cooperation between biobanks and DIC at 24 German university medical centers on both a technical and regulatory level.
This is based on
- The development of methods that enable the DIC to link patient data with selected information on associated biospecimens collected in the context of patient care (i.e., excluding clinical trials, research consortia, and cohorts) from university hospitals and available in the associated biobanks.
- The establishment of a central FHIR-based, MII-wide (feasibility) query and analysis tool for the German Research Data Portal for Health. This should facilitate
- the identification of patient groups with corresponding biosamples that are suitable for a specific research project and
- distributed data analyses across all participating university hospitals.
- The development of software tools and their simple distribution via software containers to new MII sites so that the network can be expanded quickly and easily in the future.
- Developing a scalable infrastructure that enables a seamless connection between the DIC and the European BBMRI-ERIC Common Service IT portal for managing biosamples from the healthcare sector.
