The University Clinic for Anaesthesiology, Intensive Care Medicine, Emergency Medicine and Pain Therapy (AINS) at Oldenburg Hospital has two intensive care units, an intermediate care unit and a 24-hour post-anaesthesia care unit (PACU) with a total of more than 40 beds. In addition to the care of critically ill, post-operative patients, critically injured patients and patients with circulatory support systems (e.g. veno-venous and veno-arterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO), left ventricular assist devices (LVAD), Impella) are cared for here. Multimorbid patients, i.e. those whose condition requires sophisticated care due to a variety of pre-existing conditions, are monitored around the clock, treated and cared for by an interprofessional and interdisciplinary team at university level. All vital, treatment and therapy data is documented completely digitally at the University Hospital for AINS. This large and high-resolution data enables us to answer scientific questions that previously could not be answered or could only be answered inadequately in small collectives. The Big Data working group uses modern medical informatics methods to develop risk scores that should make patient treatment safer in the future. In order to be able to use these measured values scientifically for the benefit of our patients, Oldenburg Hospital has a comprehensive and standardised consent and data protection concept with its own data servers.

Selected data is scientifically evaluated in close cooperation with the hospital's information technology department, the data protection officer, the clinical study centre and the Big Data in Medicine (Prof. Dr Antje Wulff) and AI4Heatlh (Prof. Dr Nils Strodthoff) working groups at the University of Oldenburg. Of central interest are so-called curve analyses, which can derive information from dynamic measurement variables such as blood pressure and respiratory gas curves that are not available to conventional statistical analyses. Artificial intelligence can also help to identify associations in anonymised data sets that could not have been identified using conventional methods.

In addition, the Big Data working group analyses data from international registers, which ensure greater transferability of results thanks to their multi-centre approaches. Particular attention is paid here to anaesthesia for paediatric surgery. The University Hospital for AINS is also a centre of the nationwide Network of University Medicine (NUM), which is funded by the Ministry of Science. One of NUM's current projects is to make infectiological and intensive care treatment data from a large number of hospitals available for medical information analysis in order to improve patient care in Germany in the future.

Oldenburg Hospital has had digital patient data for 25 years and is ranked 5th out of more than 1600 hospitals in the digital radar. This is the ideal basis for setting up our own patient database. This allows us to test scientific questions on various registries and use our own patient data as another independent collective. In doing so, we focus on questions that reflect the core competences at Oldenburg Hospital in particular: Paediatric anaesthesiology, perioperative care of cardiac surgery patients and the interdisciplinary treatment of multimorbid, vulnerable patient groups.

Together, we are strengthening modern risk prediction in university medicine with this research focus in order to identify those patients who require special attention and individualised treatment at an earlier stage in the future.