University Medicine Magdeburg receives major funding from the University Medicine Network for AKTIN
As part of the new funding phase of the University Medicine Network (NUM 3.0), funding has been approved for the nationwide infrastructure project AKTIN. Since 1 July 2025, the project will receive a total of 9.5 million euros in funding over a further five years. The University Medical Centre Magdeburg (UMMD) will receive 4.6 million euros from this to operate the AKTIN infrastructure and strengthen emergency, acute and intensive care medicine.
AKTIN has been part of the University Medicine Network since 2020 with the AKTIN-EZV, AKTIN@NUM and AKTIN2.0 projects. More than 90 emergency departments are currently connected to the infrastructure and the emergency admission register. With the renewed funding, AKTIN will be firmly established as a NUM platform for acute, intensive and emergency medicine as an infrastructure in the NUM. The Institute for Public Health in Acute Medicine (IPHAM) at Magdeburg University Hospital, headed by Prof Felix Walcher, and the Institute for Medical Informatics at RWTH Aachen University Hospital, headed by Prof Rainer Röhrig, together with Greifswald University Hospital, Prof Falk von Dincklage, and Essen University Hospital, PD Nora Bruns, are leading the project.
The AKTIN infrastructure serves as a nationwide platform for research and public health surveillance in emergency and acute medicine. It enables the daily updated, standardised and data protection-compliant use of routine clinical data from emergency departments - independent of local IT systems and across different locations. In addition, AKTIN develops central documentation and interoperability standards and provides the necessary technical and organisational infrastructure.
The central element of the infrastructure is the AKTIN emergency admission register. It records routine data from emergency treatment on a decentralised basis in the participating clinics, without additional documentation work for the medical staff. If data is required for scientific purposes, the requested information is collated in anonymised form in accordance with data protection regulations. The aim of AKTIN is to improve the availability of care data for research, health reporting and quality management. The data is used for the RKI's emergency admission surveillance and the Federal Ministry of Health's (BMG) burden monitoring.
From 2026, the infrastructure will be expanded to include intensive care medicine as part of the NUM project RAPID (‘Registry for adult and paediatric intensive care data’) and a corresponding intensive care register will be set up.
Since the initial funding in 2013, the infrastructure has been continuously developed - from 18 participating emergency departments in 2019 to 70 emergency departments as part of AKTIN2.0 from 2023. During the COVID-19 pandemic, AKTIN was increasingly integrated into the University Medicine Network and integrated into its infrastructure in 2022.
Contact
Dr Wiebke Schirrmeister
Head of AKTIN Office, IPHAM, UMMD
Background Informations
AKTIN
In the AKTIN emergency admission register, electronically documented treatment cases from the participating emergency departments are collected in a decentralised manner on the basis of uniform standards. The collection of data in the routine care of patients, avoiding redundancy as far as possible, enables the use of comprehensive, up-to-date and comprehensive data sets for questions of quality management, health services research, health reporting and the surveillance of infectious and non-infectious diseases. The basis for data collection in the AKTIN Emergency Department Register is the emergency department data set developed by the Emergency Documentation Section of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI) for standardised, structured documentation in the emergency department, which is continuously being further developed. Emergency departments and emergency centres throughout Germany participate in the AKTIN emergency department register, including an increasing number of paediatric emergency departments. The clinics come from both the university and non-university sectors.
The ‘Aktionsbündnis Informations- und Kommunikations-Technologie in der Intensiv- und Notfallmedizin (AKTIN)’ was founded in 2010 and set up the emergency admission register from 2013 to 2019 with funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (FKZ 01KX1319A). Since 2020, the emergency admission register has again been funded by the BMBFR as part of the NUM (FKZ: 01KX2121). Further information is available at: www.aktin.org
Network University Medicine (NUM)
The Network of University Medicine (NUM) was founded in April 2020 to coordinate clinical COVID-19 research throughout university medicine. Since then, scientists from all 37 German university medical centres have been working together on joint platforms in interdisciplinary research projects under the umbrella of the NUM. The NUM's research projects are clinically orientated and strive for directly practice-relevant findings to improve patient care or better manage major public health crises. The network has established specialised research infrastructures for this purpose. These methodological, technical and organisational platforms are maintained in the NUM and can be used for various clinical research projects, for example to support data collection and data and biosample management for large, multi-centre clinical trials. The NUM is funded by the BMFTR and coordinated by Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.