Medicus, a Vienna-based digital health company, is proud to announce a new initiative that aims to resolve the challenge of making the diagnostic data interoperable across different providers, countries languages, systems and machines.

Medicus’ Diagnostic-Data Mobility Initiative (DDMI) aims to establish a platform and set of tools that can capture the diagnostic outcome from one source in any format and convert it into any other format while preserving as much of its crucial medical context as possible.

“Putting it simply, the objective of this initiative is to be able to combine, compare and contextualise the test results of any patient from two separate labs from two separate countries, something which was not available to patients on a global level before,” said Dr. Baher Al Hakim, CEO, Medicus.

“The last thing we want to do is introduce a new standard or a coding system; instead DDMI will act as a translation layer between different standards, starting with the most common and later expanding it to cover all available standards,” added Baher.

Explaining the vision behind DDMI, Verena Kretschmann, Head of European Operations, Medicus, said: “During our almost four years of existence, we have encountered this particular challenge with every single client we have worked with. We continue to hear the same refrain from all the key players across the industry and across geographies, and as a result concluded that this is one of the largest obstacles in making health data meaningful across multiple sources. Without unified, clean and meaningful data, no smart systems or algorithms can function and thrive.”

“The German healthcare system has recently been moving towards implementing electronic patient record solutions, where multiple providers from the private and public sector are trying to implement a system that will allow them to gather, store and access information from different diagnostic providers and make that available to the German population,” she continued. 

“This has brought this issue to the forefront for us, because without a system that allows interoperability, the data cannot work with each other, and diagnostic tests are the first to be affected by this,” added Verena.

In order to solve this challenge, the platform employs technologies that Medicus has been developing gradually over the past few years, including Medicus’ own diagnostic mapping solution, its databases of coding standards and diagnostic data, NLP (natural language processing) and machine-learning.

Medicus is looking for partners to help bring this platform to full fruition, including but not limited to diagnostic labs, hospitals, electronic patient record providers, IHS (information hospital system) providers, LIS (lab information system) providers, health insurance providers, doctor associations, doctors, public agencies that are involved with health and data, universities and research institutes tackling similar challenges.

“Over the next six months, we will be busy looking for partners, working closely with them and making more progress on the platform development, and we’re planning to organize an event dedicated to this initiative in the first half of next year,” concluded Baher.

Click here for more information about Medicus.

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lab, Medicus, Diagnostic-Data Mobility Initiative, diagnostic mapping solution, diagnostic data, electronic patient record solutions Medicus, a Vienna-based digital health company, is proud to announce a new initiative that aims to resolve the challenge of making the diagnostic data interoperable across different providers, countries languages, systems and machines.