Charité Digital Clinician Scientists for future data driven medicine

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Igor Maximilian Sauer
• Subject Area: General and Visceral Surgery ; Anaesthesiology ; Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics ; Hematology, Oncology ; Cardiology, Angiology ; Cognitive, Systems and Behavioural Neurobiology ; Nephrology ; Nuclear Medicine, Radiotherapy, Radiobiology ; Dentistry, Oral Surgery
• Term: since 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 413521708

The digital transformation in medicine has begun to fundamentally change the way in which diagnosis and therapy are carried out. These changes are very extensive in many areas and, in some cases, radical. Experts with both technical and medical understanding are essential for advancing digital solutions in medicine. We believe Clinician Scientists should be positioned as drivers, innovators and users of digital developments in medicine. With the support of the DFG we started a Charité Digital Clinician Scientist Program (DCSP) in 2019 as an an innovative digital science-driven career track to prepare academic clinicians for the challenges of the emerging technological transformation of medicine: As with the “traditional” BIH Charité Clinician Scientist Program – serving as a “best-practice-model” for Germany –, DCSP participants can devote 50 percent of their working time to research (“protected time”) for three years. The integration of protected periods for research throughout the clinical training phase is in line with DFG recommendations, and we believe essential to best establish the burgeoning research career of the candidate. Qualification measures are an essential program component of the DCSP: In addition to the general structured competency-based curriculum, DCSP fellows receive target group-specific curricular offerings in digitalization, including medical information management and communication, information technology basics, mobile data collection and decision support, artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, health telematics and telemedicine, and data protection and regulatory requirements. Translational Technology Teams (TTT) as an innovative mentoring instrument in the DCSP bring together leading experts in computational sciences with clinicians and experimentalists and optimally connect, monitor and support DCSP fellows working at new technological interfaces. Each DCSP fellow has a Clinical, a Scientific and a Digital Mentor. Each TTT member fulfills the mentoring duties respective for their areas of expertise to provide clinical and research training in experimental and/or clinical settings and develop expertise in computational sciences and/or digital technologies. TTT provide advice and feedback to the fellows and assess their career paths.The DCSP is advertised twice per year. All candidates undergo a standardized and strongly formalized two-step competitive selection process in which the DCSP Board first reviews written applications (step 1) to select candidates for a public oral presentation (step 2). A total of 24 fellows from 16 different sub-specialities have been enrolled in the program as of June 2021. The overall goal of our application is to further expand this innovative and successful Digital Clinician Scientist Program to prepare academic clinicians for the challenges of the emerging technological transformation of medicine.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Professor Dr. Robert Gütig; Dr. Nathalie Huber; Professorin Dr. Silke Rickert-Sperling; Professorin Dr. Petra Ritter; Professorin Dr. Claudia Spies