Digital Medicine Group

About the Digital Medicine Group

The Digital Medicine group headed by the newly recruited FNR-PEARL Chair Prof. Dr. med. Jochen Klucken focuses on shaping and innovating personalised digital healthcare solutions, and understanding and evaluating the new benchmarks of a new ecosystem for digital medicine.

_{Figure: Different aspects and categories arise with the digitalisation in medicine.
Implementation of new healthcare ideas and innovations require multidisciplinary research approaches.}

Digitalisation in medicine is changing the way of communication in medicine: new digitally supported healthcare services complement the existing healthcare structures and procedures. Patient-centred healthcare services will address the patient's needs, continuously monitor and accompany the individual patient journey, and provide clinical decision support for the healthcare provider. "Real-life" healthcare data become available and its application in medicine has an enormous potential to reduce disease burden, improve healthcare and generate new solutions and services.

With a highly interdisciplinary team, the digital medicine group will address the questions of medical benefit, structural and procedural changes, as well as social acceptance of the resulting digital healthcare services. We want to understand how patient-centred, personalised healthcare technologies can be tailored to patients needs and integrated into the existing healthcare structures and procedures. We believe that shaping the rising age of digitalisation in medicine requires the development of new evaluation methods and benchmarking concepts to decipher "nice tools" from beneficial digital healthcare solutions. And we want to enable digital medicine for patients and caregivers, innovative healthcare providers and payers.

The Digital Medicine group will align with the digital health strategies in Luxembourg and develop digital health concepts that accelerate innovative digital healthcare technology solutions and health informatics. The group will contribute to innovations in digital healthcare solutions and improve healthcare, by enabling fast, efficient and transparent information for the patient and their healthcare team.

The Digital Medicine group started in March 2021 and is supported by the FNR-PEARL Programme at the LCSB (Luxembourg Center for Systems Biomedicine) at the University of Luxembourg, the LIH (Luxembourg Institute of Health) and the dMed Research Clinic at the CHL (Centre Hospitalier de Luxembourg).

With a strong focus on Parkinson's disease (PD), the PEARL project aims to understand how wearable sensors and smartphone applications can support patients lives and be integrated into the multidisciplinary healthcare team. We build on the existing Luxembourg Parkinson's Study consisting of more than 1600 PD patients and healthy controls within the NCER-PD programme, coordinated by Prof. Rejko Krüger. The ParkinsonNet concept already aims to connect patients, hospitals, primary care doctors and specialists, as well as therapists and other healthcare providers. The first digital healthcare solutions tested in this environment will mainly address mobility and gait, but also other relevant functional impairments in Parkinson's patients including cognitive impairment, sleep disturbances, and other non-motor functions. Our collaborating partners from industry and academia will provide their digital solutions and we will test their medical effect, and also the acceptance of patients and healthcare providers at the same time. We will also study the ethical, legal and social impact of these data-driven services to understand how the highest benefit can be reached with an acceptable risk for an individual patient and the society.

In the near future, the lessons learned from Parkinson's disease will be transferred to other diseases. Digital medicine aims to understand and shape the future of medicine. It is exciting to see how many solutions can be found when you ask the right question.

We are happy to welcome you in our team with your questions, concerns, worries, expectations and hopes. We are currently hiring team members from a broad range of backgrounds and expertises, addressing the challenges and representing the characteristics of digitalisation in medicine. For any enquiries on open positions, contact Sofia Pereira.