New York-based Mount Sinai Health System and the Hasso Plattner Institute, a German information technology institute that has bachelor’s and master’s degree programs, have teamed up to launch a new digital health institute, according to a news release sent to MedCity.
Aptly named the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, it is made possible through a $15 million gift from the Hasso Plattner Foundation. The goal is to develop digital health products with predictive and preventive capabilities that improve health outcomes.
Longer-term, the institute’s goals are to establish an organizational framework that allows researchers at HPI and Mount Sinai to collaborate across healthcare and engineering; expand funding opportunities for researchers; and research and test prototype digital health solutions for consumers, providers and health systems.
The institute will be co-led by Joel Dudley, associate professor of genetics and genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Director of Mount Sinai’s Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, and Erwin Bottinger, professor of digital health-personalized medicine at the Hasso Plattner Institute and Universität Potsdam, Germany, and head of HPI’s Digital Health Center.
Through efforts like its Institute for Next Generation Healthcare, Lab 100 and BioMe BioBank Program, Mount Sinai has existing expertise in genomics, big data and bioinformatics, among other areas.
The Hasso Plattner Institute has programs such as the HPI Digital Health Center, which focuses on connected health, machine learning and personalized medicine. The HPS Gesundheitscloud gGmbH, a nonprofit corporation funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, created a platform for health data management.
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In a statement, Dudley summarized why the organizations are working together:
Investigators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Hasso Plattner Institute have been publishing ground-breaking work in the areas of genome diagnostics, precision medicine, digital health, biomedical data science, artificial intelligence and information technology. The new Digital Health Institute will serve as an opportunity to leverage our combined expertise in these areas at scale in one of the largest and most socially and economically diverse health systems in the country.
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