BIFOLD Colloquium 11/2025

Leveraging Medical Data Sciences for Digital Transformation – A Systems Approach

Abstract: Electronic health records and routine hospital data are rapidly growing in volume and complexity, offering new opportunities for predictive analytics and clinical decision support. Realizing this potential requires advances in data engineering and medical data science. We present case studies from intensive care units at Charité, including models for forecasting postoperative complications and detecting circadian rhythm disruptions. In addition, continuous patient monitoring generates high-frequency data streams that demand real-time processing. We introduce methods for stream-based analytics of routine clinical data, addressing challenges in patient monitoring and alarm management. Finally, we outline our work on building scalable, safe analytics pipelines and discuss their role in enabling a digitized patient journey that integrates in- and outpatient care.

BIO: Felix Balzer studied medicine and computer science, including study periods in Paris and at Weill Cornell University in New York. After earning his doctoral degree in medicine (Dr. med.) in Medical Informatics at the University of Freiburg, he began his residency at Charité in 2009 and completed his habilitation (venia legendi) in Experimental Anesthesiology in 2015. One year later, he received the “Medical Informatics” certificate awarded by GMDS/GI/BVMI. In 2017, he became board-certified in anesthesiology and also completed a PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) at the Department of Computer Science at Humboldt University of Berlin.

In 2018, he was appointed to the endowed professorship for E-Health and Shared Decision Allocation at the Einstein Center Digital Future (ECDF). In January 2021, he became full professor of Medical Data Science and director of the Institute of Medical Informatics at Charité. As Chief Medical Information Officer (CMIO), he holds clinical-technical responsibility for the digitalization of patient care, the implementation of a new EMR system, and the use of routine clinical data at Charité.

From September 2024 to January 2025, he served as interim Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Charité. Since February 2025, Prof. Balzer has been Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Clinical Digitalization.