From School to Digital Health: FFG Interns Explore Healthcare Data Standards

This summer, we had the pleasure of welcoming three students from HLW Steyr: Luis, Ema, and Lorenz, to our research group as part of an FFG-funded internship.

During their time with us, they worked on the practical part of their diploma thesis, focusing on the digitalization of school health examinations. This is a highly relevant topic, as the digital transformation of health examinations and the structured exchange of the resulting data are expected to become increasingly important in Austria over the coming years.

Starting from the foundations of web technologies such as HTTP and JSON, the students quickly moved into the world of interoperable health data. They learned how information can be represented using HL7 FHIR and gained hands-on experience with established medical terminologies and coding systems such as UCUM, ICD-10, and LOINC.

Their work also addressed an important practical challenge: transforming information collected through questionnaires into structured, machine-readable data that can be stored, exchanged, analysed, and reused by digital health systems. This gave them first-hand experience of how concepts from software development, data modelling, healthcare standards, and medical informatics come together in real-world applications.

Luis, Ema, and Lorenz did a great job tackling a field that can be challenging at first. We were particularly happy to introduce them to aspects of computer science that often remain less visible in traditional IT education: standardization, semantic interoperability, and structured healthcare data.

Initiatives like this are a great opportunity to make our research and standardization activities accessible to young people from different educational backgrounds. At the same time, they demonstrate that digital health is not only about developing software, but also about ensuring that information can be understood and used consistently across systems and institutions.

Congratulations to Luis, Ema, and Lorenz on their excellent work – we wish them all the best for completing their diploma thesis!