Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering & Aarhus University Hospital Announce a Partnership Aimed at AI Innovation in Healthcare

Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST and Aarhus University Hospital (AUH) today announced a new three-year partnership. Based in Dortmund, Germany, and Aarhus, Denmark, these organisations have a long history of collaboration. This new applied research project aims to usher health data into the future by exploiting the computational power of artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical settings.

The project is founded on AUH’s proven track record with data-driven management and Fraunhofer ISST’s position as Europe's frontrunner in building and exploiting dataspaces and data ecosystems.?It will explore whether healthcare data together with data from other dataspaces can help to optimise processes, predict future disruptions (e.g. mass events, pandemics, staff shortages) and simulate the effects of changes?to internal procedures or the environment. Fraunhofer ISST and AUH hope that these datasets will prove to be a powerful tool in helping healthcare systems around the world address many of the challenges they will face in the future.

Modern logistics makes it very easy to track and communicate the real-time status and location of equipment, mobile equipment and human resources. However, very few hospitals are currently leveraging these technological advancements to optimise their processes. Using data collected by AUH, the organisations are working together and with operating room, emergency and pathology department experts to determine the need and potential uses of AI in these areas.

Anja Burmann, Deputy Head of Department Healthcare?at Fraunhofer ISST, explains,?‘The potential in this area is tangible in terms of enabling people in a highly complex work environments to not only include events that can be expected from a human perspective in the orchestration of healthcare processes and workflows, and to react ad hoc to unexpected developments and events – but also to predict short- and medium-term events by exploiting the computing power of AI.’

Starting from the data-based optimisation of ‘what is’, this project aims to develop a data-based analytics tool that is capable of predicting and managing ‘what will be’. Current systems already use these technical capabilities to provide, among other things, personalised therapy support and rapid and frictionless delivery of supplies and staff. The goal is to transform these current ‘intelligent hospitals’ into predictive and anticipatory hospitals that not only respond to challenges but also mitigate them.

Lars Ganzhorn Knudsen, Chief Analyst Officer and Executive Advisor at AUH Innovation and International Affairs, explains, ‘A?fully digitalised hospital has an enormous amount of?collected?data?spanning from patient data to logistical data. There’s a huge opportunity to leverage these datasets using AI, thereby improving operational accuracy while reducing costs and manual workloads.’

The partnership officially kicked off earlier this month. The project team will meet again at AUH in early January.?

About Fraunhofer ISST

The Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST focuses on building data spaces that enable sovereign, secure and controllable data use across corporate boundaries. The institute is an active player in international infrastructure initiatives such as International Data Spaces (IDS) and Gaia-X. In its business areas 'data economy', 'logistics' and 'healthcare', the institute conducts research on data spaces and data ecosystems, strategic data management, data science, free and open source software, software engineering and cloud transformation.

About Aarhus University Hospital (AUH)

AUH, located in Aarhus, Denmark, ranks as the third best smart hospital in Europe and the sixteenth in the world according to the American publication?Newsweek. The hospital was recently appointed to the prestigious European University Alliance (EUHA) and is considered to be at the forefront of healthcare innovation.?