With personalized and cost-intelligent treatment, the digital patient model opens up new opportunities for the healthcare industry. Patient data available in a wide range of systems are combined into a digital representation. “It offers advantages both for the concrete treatment of individual patients and for the use of overall societal healthcare expenditures,” says Dr. Stefan Wesarg, Head of the Competence Center Visual Healthcare Technologies at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD and coordinator of MED²ICIN. “The data-protection-compliant consolidation of individual health and disease data and their intelligent analysis enables the creation of a completely new solution for more effective prevention, diagnostics, therapy, and care.”

Cost reduction and relief for skilled personnel

An effective limitation of healthcare expenditures—such as avoiding expensive duplicate MRI scans or minimizing manual effort in the evaluation of imaging data—addresses the major macroeconomic challenges currently facing the healthcare sector: rising healthcare costs and the enormous shortage of skilled professionals, resulting in gaps in care.

Together with six other Fraunhofer Institutes, Wesarg and his team developed the digital twin. While an interactive dashboard clearly summarizes information and recommendations, various modules provide more detailed insights. Here, physicians can access AI-based analyses, for example of medical specialist publications, and view treatment guidelines as well as the costs of treatment options. In the cohort module, individual patient information is related to data from similar disease progressions—enabling healthcare professionals to identify which therapies work best in which cases. Patients themselves can contribute lifestyle data via an app.

Decision model proves convincing in practical testing

An online survey of nearly 50 gastroenterologists who tested the web-based system in hospitals and medical practices shows that the patient model meets its defined objectives. While 23 percent praised the cost savings, 35 percent of respondents emphasized the reduced treatment time made possible by the model. To date, the digital patient model has been used for chronic inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) and is set to be applied to additional disease patterns in the future.

Dr. Irina Blumenstein, senior physician at University Hospital Frankfurt, was involved in the development from the very beginning as an IBD expert. “The tool provides excellent support for everyday clinical practice, both for experienced experts and for less experienced gastroenterologists,” says the specialist in internal medicine, gastroenterology, and nutritional medicine.

Further development lays the foundation for broad use

In the future, Wesarg and his team will advance research at the European level together with Finnish partners. Based on data from 10,000 patients, they will further develop the model so that it can be integrated into commercially used systems and applied in everyday medical practice. “Ultimately, decisions are made by humans—but our patient model, whose individual modules are supported by artificial intelligence, provides an optimal data basis for this,” explains Wesarg.

The project partners will present in detail how the data model works—with its interactive dashboard and individual modules—on July 17 at the Campus Westend of Goethe University Frankfurt. Interested parties from clinical and industrial environments, medical technology, health IT, the pharmaceutical industry, as well as media representatives, are warmly invited.

Registration is available on the MED²ICIN Symposium website.

Journalists can register at presse@igd.fraunhofer.de.