Working with real-world medical data holds a huge opportunity for us as the Institute of Biomedical Informatics to generate medical knowledge, as it allows us to access an enormous amount of medical information. However, technical, organisational, legal and ethical challenges hamper the secondary use of this routine clinical data in research. In her Master's thesis, PhD candidate Julia Gehrmann identified some of these challenges in a literature review. The results of this literature review were subsequently summarised in the form of a commentary. This commentary, entitled "What prevents us from reusing medical real-world data in research", has now been published as an open access article in the journal Nature Scientific Data.

The Medical Informatics Initiative, which we as the Institute for Biomedical Informatics are a member of, currently launches a number of projects in its third funding phase that aim to mitigate some of these challenges and thus make real-world medical data usable for research. The preservation of legal and ethical principles such as data protection is always in the foreground.