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Introduction: There is a need in student teaching for medical informatics to expand practical exercises to address current challenges and advancements related to Open Science, data integration and analysis. Lectures provide students with the conceptual basics, while practical exercises illustrate the subject matter using concrete problems. Developing new exercises addressing such needs remains a significant challenge and effort for educators, as it requires integrating relevant software and providing appropriate datasets. The MI-Lab is a laboratory environment at the University of Leipzig for teaching medical informatics [1] based on the concept of Open Educational Resources (OER).

Methods: We extend the MI-Lab by including relevant research software from initiatives such as the National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) [2]. We examined the service portfolio of NFDI4Health for software and services that are suitable for teaching purposes. Our work offers six additional teaching units aligned with defined learning objectives from the Curricular of Medical Informatics (CMI) [3] to ensure alignment with current curricula. The flexible architecture of the MI-Lab environment supports practical exercises while facilitating both scalability and future expansion.

Results: The teaching units cover key aspects of data integration and analysis in medical informatics, including a) semantic annotation of data elements with medical terminologies, b) data transformation of clinical data into HL7 FHIR, c) data pseudonymisation and anonymisation d) data analysis, e) data publication in research data management systems, and f) data quality assessments. All exercises are based on a common medical dataset, which allows for consistency across various tasks and fosters deeper understanding. Our approach includes containerized exercises with pre-configured software, curated datasets and structured instructional materials. The instructional materials include a short introductory slidedeck and an exercise sheet for students. The materials also include a readme detailing setup instructions and a walk-through style solution for the exercise sheet aimed to assist educators. This significantly reduces preparation time for educators while enabling the integration of industry-relevant tools. We make our teaching units publicly available in GitHub [4], enabling access by students and educators of any institution.

Conclusion: The resulting teaching units are incorporated into our curriculum for medical informatics and are practically applied in teaching. At Leipzig University our resulting teaching units are applied in the two modules ‘Research Data Integration’ and ‘Information Systems in Medical Care and Research’ during this summer semester of the medical informatic master. An evaluation is part of the ongoing semester. Alignment with the CMI allowed easy integration into the teaching curriculum in this case. The alignment of MI-Lab teaching units with CMI learning objectives can be explored in HI-LONa, the Health Informatics Learning Objective Navigator [5].

We are thus contributing to the ongoing exchange of Open Educational Resources for medical informatics, not with new learning objectives of competing curricula, but with ready-to-use teaching units as part of a harmonized medical informatic curriculum.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.

Literatur

[1] Brandt K, Löbe M, Schaaf M, Jahn F, Winter A, Stäubert S. MI-Lab - A Laboratory Environment for Medical Informatics Students. Stud Health Technol Inform. 2016;228:48-52.
[2] NFDI4Health – Nationale Forschungsdateninfrastruktur für personenbezogene Gesundheitsdaten. Bausteine Forschungsdatenmanagement. 2021;2:72-85. DOI: 10.17192/bfdm.2021.2.8331
[3] Competence Catalogue for Bachelor Degree Programs in (Bio)Medical Informatics and Medical Information Management of the German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (gmds). Version 1.0 from September 2021, version 1.2 from April 2025 after minor editorial revision. Available from: https://www.gmds.de/index.php?id=1142.
[4] MI-Lab [Internet]. MI-Lab Exercises. 2025 [cited 2025 Jun 23]. Available from: https://imise.github.io/MI-Lab/
[5] MI-Lab – HI-LONa [Internet]. Hilona.de. 2022 [cited 2025 Jun 23]. Available from: https://hilona.de/index.php/MI-Lab