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Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPSLeibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS

German Centres for Health Research (DZG) and NFDI4Health Intensify Cooperation

Research Data Infrastructures and Data Science Research data Press

The Health Study Hub of the NFDI4Health initiative makes health data findable and accessible. Valuable information on widespread diseases from the German Centres for Health Research (DZG) is now also being integrated into the platform – an important step towards modern, interconnected health research.

Working Together for Transparent Health Research
The re-use of already collected research data is becoming increasingly important: data should not only be found, but also used for new research questions. In this spirit, the DZG and the NFDI4Health consortium are intensifying their cooperation and jointly expanding the Health Study Hub – a search platform for health metadata.“By incorporating the DZG studies, we are enriching the Health Study Hub with, among other things, a valuable body of clinical study data,” says Professor Juliane Fluck, Deputy spokesperson for NFDI4Health. “Publishing the studies in the Health Study Hub ensures central visibility and significantly improves their potential for re-use.”

Fighting Widespread Diseases
The DZG bring together leading scientific institutions in Germany that conduct joint research into major widespread diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, infections, lung diseases, mental and neurodegenerative disorders, as well as child and adolescent health. Thanks to the integration of their data holdings into the Health Study Hub, researchers, clinicians and other interested parties can now access consolidated information on ongoing and completed studies. At the same time, the individual research contributions of each DZG become more visible. The DZG strongly welcome this step: “Cooperating with the Health Study Hub enables us to make our studies accessible, enriched with a wealth of information for science, healthcare and the public, and to further commit ourselves to open research data. This promotes knowledge transfer and represents an important contribution to a more interconnected research landscape in the health sector,” explains Professor Werner Seeger, spokesperson for the DZG.

The Goal: FAIR Health Data with the Health Study Hub
The Health Study Hub is NFDI4Health’s central search platform for clinical, epidemiological and public health data. It does not provide access to the actual data, but to so-called metadata – structured descriptions of the respective datasets. Researchers can use the platform to give visibility to their health data or to search for existing descriptive data relating to a specific disease or research question. In this way, data become FAIR. FAIR stands for the key principles of data management: “Findable”, “Accessible”, “Interoperable” and “Reusable”.
At present, around 46,000 studies, instruments and documents are available in the Health Study Hub. With the new DZG partnership, the Health Study Hub will be expanded further and will continue to establish itself as a central platform for health studies in Germany.

The NFDI4Health is part of the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), funded by the federal and state governments. NFDI4Health aims to build a comprehensive inventory of German epidemiological, public health, and clinical study data. The analysis of these data is essential for the development of new therapies, cross-cutting care approaches, and preventive measures. Personal health data require special protection. Therefore, NFDI4Health’s stated objective is to combine security with usability. The consortium comprises an interdisciplinary team from 14 partner institutions. In addition, 52 renowned institutions and individuals from the healthcare sector have pledged their participation; letters of support have been received from 8 (inter)national institutions.

A key objective of the Federal Government’s health research programme is to improve the fight against the most common diseases – the widespread diseases. With the German Centres for Health Research (DZG), established as long-term, equal partnerships between non-university research institutions, universities and university hospitals, the Federal Ministry for Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) and the Länder have created the conditions for this. Several thousand researchers and physicians work within one of Germany’s largest health research networks to bring medical progress to patients more quickly – across research disciplines and organisational boundaries.