Institute for Digitization in Medicine

Developing new digital solutions in the healthcare sector is a major challenge because of the special ethical, medical and regulatory requirements. Digital health start-ups in particular, but also SMEs, often lack access to routine clinical practice in order to develop and test products in a protected environment in everyday clinical practice. In addition, the certification of medical devices may require a clinical study or application observations (real world data).

"In this development process, the Translational Center at the Freiburg University Medical Center can be an important bridge between development and market readiness," says Prof. Dr. Frederik Wenz, Chief Medical Director of the Freiburg University Medical Center. "In the sense of a living lab, it offers the opportunity to advance new technologies in a real-world setting under optimal conditions so that many patients can benefit from them as soon as possible."

The Translational Centre - Digitalization in Medicine brings together the following institutions

• Department of Neurosurgery
• Department of Neurology and Neurophysiology
• Institute for Digitization in Medicine

This makes it possible to bring together the potential of two research-strong clinics with their technological and scientific networks from the Brainlinks Brain tools cluster of excellence with the lively start-up scene and established medium-sized companies from the medical technology and software sector.

This concept of translation has proven itself in the biomedical sector and is being transferred to digitization here. This is why a translation center is always also a specific medical division where digitization takes place. The aim is not only to develop innovative digitalization concepts for the hospital, but also to evaluate new types of sensors and IoT concepts. Medical documentation should take place in the process, not by the doctor or nurse, but rather in the sense of an automatic log file that is recorded by the systems in the process and continuously checked with regard to treatment quality.