OFFIS , which is founded in 1981, is an application-oriented non-profit research and development institute related to the Computer Science department of the University of Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, north-western Germany. Its primary mission is to:

• adopt the findings from university basic research in computer science and other relevant disciplines
• stay in touch with new market demands through its many years of experience in co-operation projects with the industry and
• bridge the gap between "basic research" and "application demands" through application-oriented research.

The content-related work at OFFIS is performed in projects within fixed time scales. The institute has a wide spectrum of projects covered. Among them are projects which are financed through state funding from the Ministry for Science and Culture, publicly supported (e.g. by the EU or Federal Science Ministry), partly internationallyoriented third-party-funded projects or even specific development and consultancy projects. By 2001, third party funding ratio reached the amount of 73%. of the total yearly research budget of some 8 million ?. With this ratio, OFFIS has a top ranking both among the other institutes in Lower Saxony as well as nationwide.

OFFIS staff counts at the moment about 150 employees. More than a hundred scientists (in their vast majority computer scientists, but also engineers, economists, physicists and from other disciplines as well) work in interdisciplinary teams. The rest is covered through the administrative staff, students, apprentices etc.

OFFIS focuses its R&D activities in five challenging application areas:

• Healthcare information and communication systems (IG)
• Business information and knowledge management (BI)
• Multimedia and internet information services (MI)
• Embedded Hardware/Software Systems (HS)
• Safety Critical Systems (SC)

The OFFIS R&D Division "Healthcare Information and Communication Systems"
In the health sector, patient-related data are acquired (recorded), processed and evaluated for various purposes.This requires I&C systems that allow optimal data processing and utilisation in daily hospital practice as well as in clinical and epidemiological research. Taking this into account, the "Healthcare information and communication systems" R&D division among other things develops clinical information and assistant systems. The objective is to optimise and as far as possible automate documentation, acquisition and processing methods in specialist departments (e.g. cardiac surgery and cardiology). This includes the implementation of software and hardware assistance during the whole workflow starting from the diagnosis via surgical treatment to post-surgery hospitalization. Additional work focuses on integrating these department systems in extensive clinical I&C systems.

A further area of work is distributed cooperation in medical care, which allows a geographical breakdown of examination results (e.g. X-ray images). Furthermore, the division is working on software tools that can be used to create and analyse data records of epidemiological cancer registries or sensitive environment systems. In particular, the following activities are currently carried out by researchers of the OFFIS R&D Division "Healthcare Information and Communication Systems":

• Development of departmental information systems for cardiology that support doctors in their daily work and ensure swift access to all the necessary data, with a particular focus on the quality of the data and image material. Intraoperative navigation systems help the cardiologist to acquire optimal image data with minimal radiation and to derive quantitative results (size of structures) from the image data.
• Telemedicine: OFFIS has been involved in a number of telemedicine projects such as the EU projects RETAIN and SAMTA. Technical expertise on WANs, usage patterns and data protection issues has been established.
• DICOM/PACS: OFFIS maintains an Open Source DICOM toolkit, which includes support for many recent additions to DICOM such as security, digital signatures or consistent presentation of images.
• Cancer registry and tools for epidemiological evaluation: Since 1993, OFFIS has been involved in setting up and running the Epidemiological Cancer Registry of Lower Saxony. A wealth of tools supporting the operation of the confidence office and the registration office as well as statistical evaluation and data quality management have been developed.
• Mammography screening: The Weser-Ems region, technically and administratively supported by OFFIS, is involved in one of three pilot projects in Germany, in which doctors are trying out new, more intensive forms of co-operation in order to earlier identify signs of breast cancer, based on EU guidelines.
• Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise: A common initiative by medical industry and professional organisations addressing issues of interoperability and workflow support in medical IT. OFFIS supports the initiative by providing the German Technical Manager.
• Web service based integration of medical information systems: OFFIS is participant of the ongoing ARTEMIS FP6 IST project (IST-1-002103-ST) that develops a semantic web service based P2P infrastructure for the interoperability of medical information system.
• Standardisation: OFFIS members have been actively contributing to medical informatics standardisation in CEN/TC 251, DIN (Normenausschuss Medizin) and the DICOM Committee.

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