No quod sanctus instructior ius, et intellegam interesset duo. Vix cu nibh gubergren dissentias. His velit veniam habemus ne. No doctus neglegentur vituperatoribus est, qui ad ipsum oratio. Ei duo dicant facilisi, qui at harum democritum consetetur.
From April 1, the clinics of Heidelberg University Medicine will be competing against each other in an exciting competition: Who will manage to gain the most new Broad Consent consents in relation to patient volume?
To kick off the Broad Consent Challenge on February 27, Prof. Dr. Christoph Dieterich from the Klaus Tschira Institute for Computational Cardiology at the UKHD in an interview with Christian Fick from corporate communications at the UKHD about the importance of Broad Consent, the goals for research and why every consent counts.
Professor Dieterich, what exactly is broad consent?
Broad consent is a standardized model text for informing patients throughout Germany and for consenting to the use of their pseudonymized data for medical research. It is a significant success of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) and makes it possible to make routine data from clinical care accessible for research purposes via a data use request. This enables patients to make a valuable contribution to clinical research in Germany. The scientific knowledge gained and optimized processes in turn contribute directly to improving their own treatment.
What results do you hope to achieve by collecting routine data and don't you see any danger of losing track of the data?
Patient data that is generated during treatment reflects the actual conditions of our healthcare system. This data is systematically collected at all German university hospitals and made available for scientific studies and analyses via the data integration centers on the basis of broad consent. For me as a data scientist, this opens up the possibility of subjecting statistical models and algorithms to a “reality check”. For example, I can check whether the method I developed in Heidelberg for predicting cardiovascular risks works just as reliably in Munich, Leipzig or Hamburg - an exciting question. However, in order to be able to carry out such studies in a meaningful way, we need as many consents as possible across numerous locations and clinical pictures. In this respect, I am in no danger of losing the overview due to the amount of data. The more data there is, the better it is for our research.
It is therefore crucial that as many clinics as possible, including UKHD, persuade their patients to agree to the subsequent use of their clinical data. How much persuasion do you have to do here?
At UKHD, I have experienced a great deal of openness towards broad consent among both staff and patients. By piloting it in two large departments, the BC Task Force was able to set up the necessary technical infrastructure and gain valuable insights into the use of Broad Consent at UKHD. One frequently discussed topic is the need for additional resources. Thanks to the two pilot projects, we were able to better assess and optimize this.
Now we are setting a further accent with the Broad Consent Challenge: it will be presented to all clinics on February 27: Between April 1 and December 31, the clinics will compete against each other - who will manage to gain the most new Broad Consent consents relative to patient volume? There are great prizes up for grabs - including temi, the BC-Serviceroboter, that was already in use in one of the pilot areas.
I'm already looking forward to the kick-off meeting and the exciting challenge months!
Do you have any questions about Broad Consent? Then please contact
