Health Sector Applications

The "Health Sector Applications" cluster consists of three research projects. Medical data is particularly sensitive and confidential in nature, making the safeguarding of confidentiality imperative.

The projects will develop cloud-based applications which meet the exacting requirements of the health sector and make efficiency potential, utilizable, for example, through simulation data analysis. Practical solutions tailored to the requirements of the "Mittelstand" are also prioritized in this sector.

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cloud4health
GeneCloud - Cloud Computing in Drug Development for Small and Medium-sized Businesses
TRESOR - Trusted Ecosystem for Standardized and Open Cloud-based Resources

cloud4health

Cloud Services for the Secondary Use of Medicinal Routine Data in Business and Research

A high level of protection of sensitive medical data is ensured with the involvement of an independent non-profit organization. This should increase health sector confidence levels in cloud computing and create the possibility of making data-sensitive applications available in the cloud in future.

In what is a highly topical issue (secondary use of raw medical data), cloud4health combines textual analysis technologies and data warehousing approaches in concrete medical and economically relevant application scenarios. Whether installed as a private or public cloud (subject to individual requirements), cloud4health opens up sizeable virtual patient populations for date protection-compliant evaluation of questions arising in the research, development, and health economy sectors for improved patient care.

Three concrete application scenarios will be realized within the cloud4health project:

In the first scenario, anonymized patient data specific to surgical hip treatment is extracted and analyzed in order to develop an important instrument for improving quality of medical treatment.
In the second application scenario, automated medical treatment plausibility and performance audit methods are developed. This puts an important tool for the evaluation of course of medical treatment (against a background of tightened health care budgets ) on a medical basis in the hands of health care providers.
In the third scenario, adverse side effects of newly introduced drugs are identified at an early stage (increasing patient safety in terms of new drug treatments) through automated processes.

GeneCloud - Cloud Computing in Drug Development for Small and Medium-sized Businesses

The research and development costs of new drugs in the pharmaceutical industry are rising exponentially as the number of newly approved drugs continues to fall. Here, high throughput methods, which deliver much broader answers to biomedical issues, promise an improvement. Data is generated in quantities that require computing power not ordinarily available to SMEs. Cloud computing provides access to the necessary computing power with the appropriate level of protection appropriate to the highly sensitive nature of the corporate pharmaceutical data generated.

GeneCloud is developing three drug screening applications which allow biomarkers in cancer therapies to be forecast, test agents for their ability to bind to target proteins and predict side effects through automated literature analysis. All three applications share the fact that they need to be parallelized for the cloud and special processes for the protection of data are necessary. Cryptographic technologies are insufficient as even the data receiver (i.e. external cloud provider) should not be able to access the data.

GeneCloud eliminates this problem by developing a new steganographic security concept. Classical cryptographic processes are extended by making use of new domain-specific steganographic procedures. These make provision for the anonymization, mixing and hiding of data to realize flexible and scalable protection.

TRESOR - Trusted Ecosystem for Standardized and Open Cloud-based Resources

TRESOR will make a "trusted cloud" infrastructure that provides all of the appropriate legal requirements, safety and data protection guidelines as well as individual health sector institution guidelines available for the first time.

Supply structures within the health care sector are becoming increasingly specialized. Requirements placed on the health sector in future will not be realizable without a functional networking of the different performance levels. Software systems deployed today are operations-based as opposed to process-oriented set-ups which have developed over the years (i.e. the networking of the different performance levels can only be poorly implemented on the basis of existing solutions).

A new generation architecture change awaits established market systems which, through a “make or break” pervasiveness of the developed systems (e.g. attempt to implement clinical pathways into a non-generic and non-workflow-oriented system), will only partially be implemented. As well as this, the operation of the respective solutions is complex and cost-intensive.

The barriers mentioned are eliminated through a standardized modularization of medical applications services, allowing the reuse of cloud-based services according to innovative business models. This means cost optimization and investment protection alongside a measurable increase in patient care quality.

One of the biggest challenges of cross-clinic in-patient care is the design of a data protection compliant, closed and inter-institutional process chain with seamless media -based process documentation system.

The TRESOR project meets this challenge through the exemplary implementation of seamless media-based medical process documentation between project-participating hospitals. A further intention of the TRESOR project is the establishment of cloud-based medical treatment-supporting services for the reliable testing of drug interactions according to currently available information. TRESOR puts the forward-looking development of cloud-enabled software services in view.