Health care in Germany is subject to constant change. The aim of health services research is to investigate how access to health care, its quality and cost-effectiveness, and patient-specific benefits are influenced by social and individual factors, organizational structures and processes, financing systems, and new innovations. Health services research provides evidence for the provision of health care to the population under everyday conditions.

In this area, too, InGef aims to provide practical impulses for the further development of health care in Germany.

On the basis of anonymized routine data, we investigate the current need for care in order to identify any deficits in care. We evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of (new) care structures and processes. We also look at the care services provided and the impact of current care on the quality of health of the insured.

In order to contribute to the further development of health care in Germany, we investigate questions from all areas of health services research:

  • Prevalence and incidence of selected diseases
  • Socio-demographic and socio-economic differences
  • Clinical characteristics (e.g. comorbidities and concomitant medication)
  • Utilization of health care services (e.g., hospitalizations, physician visits, prescription of medications, remedies and aids, incapacity for work and sickness benefits)
  • Care pathways (patient pathways)
  • Implementation of/compliance with external quality standards such as national care guidelines or GBA guidelines
  • Issues relating to drug safety
  • Cost-effectiveness of therapies or care structures
  • Economic implications of new therapies for the solidarity community

Pharmacoepidemiology

Within the framework of pharmacoepidemiological studies, epidemiological methods are applied to questions concerning drug therapy. Thus, pharmacoepidemiology provides a basis for the assessment of drug therapy in the everyday care of the statutory health insurance in Germany. The aim of InGef is to contribute to the evidence-based use of medicines, both in terms of efficacy and safety and with regard to health economic efficiency. For example, we have investigated the extent to which nonadherence to therapeutic anticoagulation is associated with stroke risk.

Consideration of national and international recommendations for the conduct and publication of research results are a matter of course for us. We work according to, among others:

Grant projects

As a reliable partner, InGef supports numerous grant projects with a focus on health services research and new forms of health services. Our expertise ranges from the application of various funding programs to the operational project management and the development of evaluation concepts to the project implementation with proven or innovative scientific methods. Here you will find a selection of current grant projects.

The protection of highly sensitive health data is the focus of the KI-FDZ collaborative project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Health. In addition to the InGef Institute for Applied Health Research Berlin GmbH, the Research Data Center Health (FDZ) at the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM), the AG Medizininformatik of the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at the Charité- Universitätsmedizin Berlin, the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Medicine MEVIS and Mostly AI are involved.

The expansion and further development of the FDZ is intended to sustainably improve the secure use of health data for research purposes in Germany. Therefore, in the next three years, using relevant use cases based on the InGef research database, the anonymization quality of classical anonymization methods (ARX Tool) will first be compared with synthetically generated health data. The goal is to ensure maximum protection of the privacy of patient data while maintaining the usability of the data. The prototypical implementation of the methods in an open-source platform (Conquery), supports the continuous evaluation of the transferability to the processes in the FDZ.

In addition, the project will explore the benefits of AI methods for the analysis of the data and which tools can be offered to authorized users to conduct AI experiments.

The REVASK project investigates whether and to what extent the collaboration of physicians from the two disciplines of cardiology and cardiac surgery in so-called heart teams influences the decision on revascularization therapy - stent by catheter or bypass surgery - in persons with chronic coronary artery disease (cKHD). The evaluation focuses on patients for whom the National Health Care Guideline cKHK primarily recommends an invasive procedure (bypass).

In addition to the InGef Institute for Applied Health Research Berlin GmbH, the Freiburg University of Education, the German Society for Thoracic, Cardiac and Vascular Surgery (DGTHG), the Foundation Institute for Heart Attack Research (IHF), the PMV Research Group (University of Cologne), the BARMER and the Techniker Krankenkasse (TK) as consortium partners and the German Society of Cardiology - Heart and Circulation Research (DGK e.V.) as cooperation partners are involved in the project. The REVASK project is funded by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA) within the framework of the Innovation Fund.

Through a cooperation with the Institute of Social Medicine and Health Systems Research at Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg, InGef is involved in the project egePan-Unimed within the Network University Medicine (NUM) funded by the BMBF. Partly in cooperation with public health insurances (AOK Bavaria, AOKplus Saxony, Barmer, DAK and Techniker Krankenkasse) and the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), various scientific questions concerning COVID-19 are being addressed. Studies on the prevalence of risk factors for a severe COVID-19 course in the German population have already been completed. For the evaluation of the safety of COVID-19 vaccination, necessary analyses on the background incidence of sinus vein thrombosis and myocarditis could be performed by InGef on short notice.

Three further research topics are in progress or are currently being published within the framework of this collaboration. One is the identification of risk factors for severe COVID-19 progression. Furthermore, COVID-19 associated long-term consequences (Post COVID-19) in the German population - especially in children and adolescents - will be addressed. And finally, another subproject deals with the care of mentally ill persons during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The German-Canadian collaborative project AIR_PTE was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection and the National Research Council of Canada and aimed to develop artificial intelligence (AI) methods for improved and automated estimation of treatment effects in studies based on German and Canadian routine data. The methods were developed using a pilot study on the safety and efficacy of antithrombotic therapies in patients with venous thromboembolism. The methods were evaluated using another study of work disability after psychotherapeutic treatments (study under review). Furthermore, a presentation of the AI methods developed in the project has been published. Parts of the methodology have been implemented in the open-source software ConQuery as an easy-to-use tool and thus also made available to users of the EVA.

The sekTOR-HF (New Forms of Care) project, funded by the Innovation Fund from the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA), sets the following goals: Reduction of unnecessary hospitalizations and avoidance of readmissions through post-hospital care, development and establishment of a cross-sector care model using the example of heart failure, implementation of a network office for the coordination of cross-sector care processes, and the development and simulation of an alternative reimbursement model. The project is optimally positioned for this, because in addition to InGef, the consortium partners AOK, DAK, Institut für angewandte Versorgungsforschung (inav), Kassenärztliche Vereinigung Bayern (Bavarian Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians), PriMa e.G., Rhön-Klinikum, Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung (rwi), Universitätsklinikum Gießen und Marburg (UKGM) and Zentrum für Telemedizin Bad Kissingen (ZTM) are working closely together.

The OpioiDE project, funded by the BfArM for 18 months, started at the end of 2021. In cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology (BIPS), InGef is participating in the project on the use of opioid-containing drugs in Germany. In the research project INHECOV-Socioeconomic inequalities in health during the COVID-19 pandemic, associations between socioeconomic status and COVID-19 are being investigated on behalf of the RKI and with funding from the DFG.