In half a century of antibiotics use, new challenges have surfaced: the fast emergence of resistances among pathogens and the overuse of antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance results in escalating healthcare costs, increased morbidity and mortality and the (re-)emergence of potentially untreatable pathogens. For infectious diseases DebugIT will

• Detect patient safety related patterns and trends
• Acquire knowledge
• Invest this knowledge to upgrade quality healthcare.

The DebugIT project will use clinical and operational information from Clinical Information Systems (CIS) across the European Union through the view of a virtualized, fully integrated Clinical Data Repository. It will feature transparent access to the original CIS together with data aggregations in a local store. Highly advanced new text, image and structured data mining on individual patients, as well as on populations, will render valuable informational and temporal patterns of patient harm. This is going to be fed into a Medical Knowledge Repository and mixed with domain informaion coming from external sources (guidelines and scientific evidence). After validating, this knowledge will be used by a decision support and monitoring tool in the clinical environment to prevent harmful patient safety issues and report on them. Outcomes and benefits of clinical and socio-economic termsare going to be measured. The results will be integrated into CIS of participating European hospitals, industry and their clients and become available globally. This shall happen through a European or world wide Disease Control Centre/Public Authority and also be an Open Source solution.

Advanced ICT applications and innovations concern the virtualization of the Clinical Data Repository. This happens through ontology and terminology binding and mediation, advanced data mining techniques, the use of machine reasoning related to real, point-of-care patient data, as well as consolidation of all these techniques in a comprehensive but open framework. Output will be applicable to other clinical fields.