HiGHmed - About us - Our History

HiGHmed is a nationwide medical informatics project with the aim of improving the accessibility of medical patient data for clinical research, teaching and healthcare.

The HiGHmed consortium participates in the national funding program "Medical Informatics Initiative (MII)", which was announced in 2015 by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The funding program aims to advance digitization in medicine by facilitating the exchange and sharing of data between research institutions and healthcare providers through innovative IT solutions.

After an initial conceptual phase, the founding members of the HiGHmed consortium, Heidelberg University Hospital, Göttingen University Hospital and Hannover Medical School, received funding for the development and networking phase (2018-2022). At the start of the phase in 2018, five additional university hospitals joined the project: the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the University Hospital Cologne, the University Hospital Würzburg, the University Hospital Münster and the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein. In addition, the Carl-Thiem-Klinikum Cottbus was the first hospital to join the HiGHmed consortium as a network partner in 2020.

To date, the consortium bundles the know-how of 12 university hospitals and medical faculties as well as other academic and industrial partners. This strong know-how has been applied in prototypical clinical use cases in oncology, cardiology and infection control. Since January 1, 2023, the HiGHmed consortium is in the consolidation and further development phase (2023-2026) of the BMBF funding program.

In 2019, HiGHmed Association was founded as a registered association and is supported by all clinical partners of the HiGHmed consortium. HiGHmed Association establishes strategic collaborations with institutions from science, politics and industry and develops concepts to expand the existing research focus of HiGHmed. In addition to providing central services to the HiGHmed consortium, the association supports the management, coordination and implementation of other research initiatives and projects within the HiGHmed ecosystem. The association provides consulting services as well as operational and strategic support for a variety of projects.

The first project supported by HiGHmed e.V. since 2020 is the central database and portal of the government-funded Network University Medicine (NUM). The COVID-19 Data Exchange Platform (CODEX) project aims to establish a central, secure and interoperable data platform for research results on COVID-19. Since the technological core of the project's central components was developed within HiGHmed, the association is entrusted with the technical project management of CODEX. The IT infrastructure developed within the HiGHmed consortium is now established at all CODEX sites. The developed platform will coordinate and standardize the currently still decentralized and inconsistent collection, storage and provision of research data at university hospitals nationwide, thus making highly topical research results on COVID-19 available in a centralized and timely manner.

In 2022, HiGHmed e.V. took over the operational responsibility for the central components of the created NUM routine data platform, which will be further developed step by step.

Our History

HiGHmed Consortium

HiGHmed Association

Together, we will advance our organisational structure and shape the future of HiGHmed.