HiGHmed is a project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research. It is part of the funding program "Medical Informatics" to further improve the digital connection of the German healthcare system. In cooperation with university hospitals as well as medical faculties and other partners from science and industry, we research and implement new solutions for the processing of medical patient data. We participate in the use case infection control. 

In close cooperation with the Chair of Graphical Interactive Systems at the TU Darmstadt, we are developing a novel, interactive visualization and analysis tool to detect pathogen outbreaks as early as possible. The system is called SmICS " Smart Infection Control System" and is intended to detect outbreaks of pathogens in order to avoid, among other things, high healthcare cost.

With the help of experts, a dataset was created which contains information about the case data, age, gender and movement data. Through anonymization it is not possible to trace the data back to the original patients.

Originally, the infection chains of multidrug-resistant bacteria were studied. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the focus shifted to the via droplet-transmissible viral disease. Especially now, in the middle of this pandemic, it is of enormous importance to detect new outbreaks as quckliy as possible. To secure this goal HiGHmed is supported by its sister projects B-FAST and CODEX in data collection and distribution.

Our approaches are being further developed in a constant exchange with physicans, hygienists and infection control experts. Next, we are working on a visualization that represents longer patient stays and still reliaböy allows the tracking of time, contacts and movements. In addition, we are working on how to collect relevant data and integrate it into the SmICS interface in the future.