NUM Dashboard
The NUM dashboardprovides a glimpse into the future of cross-site technological collaboration in the service of patient care and research. It demonstrates the possibility of combining medical data from various hospital information systems of participating university hospitals in near real time and presenting it in compliance with the highest data protection requirements.
As a nationwide source of information, the NUM dashboard serves hospital staff as well as political decision-makers, researchers and the public and provides an overview of the care, resource and capacity situation in German university medicine. The ability to obtain and process information quickly and broadly is essential, especially in pandemic situations, in order to be able to make informed decisions, e.g. on resource planning or political measures. It should also be possible to better assess and predict smaller seasonal waves of infection and their development in order to open up and utilise the opportunity for more targeted preparation.
The current NUM dashboard originated as an internal UKB dashboard in March 2020, followed by its expansion into a cross-site dashboard in the SMITH consortium. The dashboard front end was then rebuilt in the NUM CODEX project and the interoperability standard of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) was integrated into the development. The dashboard is currently in the third NUM funding phase as part of NUM-SAR and, with the targeted further development of content in close collaboration with the PAKOP, MuSE, GenSurv and ESVE modules as well as external expertise, is driving both content enhancements and the ongoing professionalisation of the development process in order to contribute to the strategic resilience of the healthcare system in times of pandemic and crisis.
Fundamental to the dashboard is the "Privacy by Design" architecture, which allows flexible federated and near-real-time analyses. The data from the respective hospital information system is processed decentrally at the location and in the respective data integration centre (NUM-DIZ). The data aggregation carried out and the additional decoupling of all characteristic axes produces an anonymous data set on site, which is transmitted to the dashboard central instance.
Infection and care data on COVID, influenza and RSV are currently displayed. Furthermore, the section on paediatrics and child and adolescent psychiatry is being continuously expanded in order to meet the mandate of monitoring the care situation of children and adolescents as a particularly vulnerable part of society. In addition, project-related information, e.g. on study inclusions, is also presented in separate areas, which are intended to provide a central overview and status information.
The NUM Dashboard is constantly being further developed. The underlying dataset description and the visualisation are regularly adapted to the needs identified - particularly in the interdisciplinary collaboration with scientists from different departments and the responsible federal authorities in NUM-SAR.