DebugIT: Building a European distributed clinical data mining network to foster the fight against microbial diseases Christian LOVIS a,1 , Teodoro DOUGLAS a , Emilie PASCHE a , Patrick RUCH a , Dirk COLAERT b , and Karl STROETMANN c a University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland b Agfa HealthCare, Belgium c empirica GmbH, Germany for the DebugIT consortium Abstract. The expansion of clinical information systems and the reduction in computing costs have led to an explosion of patient data available for reuse. However, this data is rarely combined and analyzed in an integrated manner. The DebugIT project is a large-scale integrating project funded within the 7th EU Framework Programme (FP7). The main objectives of the project are to build IT tools that should have significant impacts for the monitoring and the control of infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistances in Europe; this will be realized by building a technical and semantic infrastructure able to a) share heterogeneous clinical data sets from different hospitals in different countries, with different languages and legislations; b) analyze large amounts of this clinical data with advanced multi-modal data mining; c) apply the obtained knowledge for clinical decisions and outcome monitoring. The concepts and architecture underlying this project are discussed. Keywords. Infectious disease, patient safety, semantic inter-operability, multi- modal data mining, decision support, clinical outcome monitoring Introduction Building a safer and more efficient care system has become the most shared goal of all actors involved in healthcare. From a historical perspective, there has been an impressive shift towards awareness of the impact of errors in medicine in the last 25 years. In the early nineties, research papers and reports about patient safety, incident reporting and initial order-entry systems were published, mostly originating from academic settings. At about the same time, the first reports of the US Institute of Medicine (IOM) on computerized patient record systems stressed the ability of ICT- based solutions to improve the quality of care [1]. Ten years later, by the end of the nineties, a famous report of the IOM called attention to the wide prevalence of errors in healthcare [2]. While medical errors are under the spotlight, (re-)emerging infectious diseases are becoming major challenges. Among them, the rapid development of anti- 1 Corresponding Author: Service of Medical Informatics, University Hospitals of Geneva; E-mail: Christian.lovis@hcuge.ch