Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (Austria)

Representative

Dr. Rada Hussein, Principal Investigator

Link to: rada.hussein@dhp.lbg.ac.at

 

About the Institutional Member

The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Digital Health and Prevention (LBI-DHP: https://dhp.lbg.ac.at/) was established in an Open Innovation in Science (OIS) process which directed the selection of the research topic, consortium partners, and key scientific staff. The institute started in October 2019 in Salzburg-Austria, and the LBI international interdisciplinary team has grown to 16 persons (full-time employees, including in-kind staff and Co-Investigators).

The main mission of the LBI-DHP is to develop, evaluate and implement digital health interventions that will support life-long sustainable heart-healthy physical activity in cardiac patients, in patient groups with increased risk of cardiovascular disease, and in the general population. The institute’s goals are (1) to produce innovative and contextualized digital health interventions for supporting heart-healthy physical activity, (2) to establish the required digital infrastructure for these interventions, and (3) to generate scientific evidence of the effectiveness of these interventions.

As health data is the crucial enabler for personalized medicine, all LBI-DHP research activities are supported by a health informatics framework -as a backbone for digital health intervention- that provides:

  • improved patient engagement
  • enhanced coordination of care
  • more accurate and integrated health data
  • patient data privacy and security.

 

Research and Projects

DH-Convener initiative

LBI-DHP leads the DH-Convener initiative in Austria for collecting, protecting, and integrating Patient-Generated Health Data (PGHD) with the Austrian Electronic Health Record (ELGA). The initiative aims at providing interoperability and security as a service as a prerequisite for the digital innovations envisioned for future medicine. The convener relies on the person-centered approach to engage the users in developing their care plans. This initiative will also empower users to directly share and control their health data for clinical care and research aligning with the European Health Data Space (EHDS) initiative. The DH-Convener concept of Dr. Hussein was the winner of the Austrian BMK ministry’s Nexus Digital Health Innovation Challenge for future health data organization in May 2020.

On the 1st of September 2022, the DH-Convener was selected as one of the finalists for the X-eHealth Interoperability Award 2022.

 

H2O (Associated collaborator) 

During the past two years, the LBI-DHP established strong partnerships with national and global academic, professional, and industrial organizations to realize the DH-Convener concept.  To create a synergy between the DH-Convener and similar projects in European Union, LBI-DHP is an associated collaborator of the Health Outcomes Observatory project (H2O) project (coordinated by the Medical University of Vienna). The H2O-EU Innovative Medicine Initiatives (IMI) funded project- aims at creating ‘health outcomes observatories’ that will amplify the patient voice both in their own healthcare as well as in healthcare systems more broadly.

 

HL7®- Patient Contributed Data (PCD) whitepaper

Since May 2021, we participated with the Health Level Seven (HL7) International -Contributed Data group, which focuses on identifying principles and rights for patients and their data as well as assessing standards that impact patient contributed data. We also provided a use case for PCD implementation in cardiac rehabilitation.