The Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM)

In 2005 a major collaboration in Melbourne, Australia successfully implemented a major medical informatics infrastructure The convergence of life sciences, healthcare, and information technology is now driving research into the fundamentals of disease causation and toward tailoring individualized treatment. The Molecular Medicine Informatics Model (MMIM) is a 'virtual' research repository of clinical, laboratory and genetic data sets. Integrated data, physically located within independent hospital and research organisations can be searched and queried seamlessly via a federated data integrator Researchers must gain authorisation to access data, and obtain permission from the data owners before the data can be accessed. The legal and ethical issues surrounding the use of this health data have been addressed so data complies with privacy requirements. The MMIM platform also record links individual cases across multiple institutions and multiple clinical specialties. Significant research outcomes in epilepsy and colorectal cancer have already been enabled by the MMIM research platform. The infrastructure of MMIM enables discovery research to be accessible via the Web with security intellectual property and privacy addressed.