gms | German Medical Science

The first joint conference of the GMDS & CEN-IBS 2020 brings together two important societies for data sciences. The different disciplines of data sciences include medical informatics, bioinformatics, biostatistics, epidemiology, public health and medical documentation.

Our slogan Bringing Data to Life takes account of the fact that we are faced with an increasing amount of data in medical research, which is naturally related to a fast developing digitalization of the health system. For the first time, the annual meeting of the two organizing societies takes place in a purely virtual meeting, which is caused by the current pandemic situation. This provides challenges and problems, but also new visions. Digitalization has been selected as a key topic for this conference long before the pandemia started and the impact of this field has now gained an increased public attention.

The three papers published within this issue have been selected out of a high number of conference submissions and all cover topics of the digitalized health system.

The work by Wolters et al. “Data validation for healthcare cost analysis in STROKE OWL” [1] covers the topic of data validation in the context of health care cost analyses. A big challenge is here the design of a data format for data of various health insurance companies using different data source systems. Deviations from ICD code thereby is a prominent problem.

The paper by Benning et al. “Comparison of accuracy of activity measurements with wearable activity trackers in wheelchair users: a preliminary evaluation” [2] deals with the accuracy of activity measurements by wearable activity trackers such as Apple Watch Series 4 and Fitbit Flex 2 in the context of wheelchair users. It is shown that different devices vary considerably in accuracy.

The paper by Langnickel et al. “The future of German MeSH: a new semi-automatic translation process and new services for search and annotation” [3] proposes a semi-automatic translation process for a German version of the controlled biomedical vocabulary MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) which also provides machine readable formats and an integration within the ontology service SemLookP.

Data validation, data accuracy and coding standards are all topics directly related to one of our conference key topics “reproducible research, reporting and data sharing”. The variety of these topics moreover illustrates how diverse the field of a digitalized health system truly is. These three articles provide important contributions to this important research area.