The COVID-19 Data Exchange Platform of the German University Medicine

COVID-19 has challenged the healthcare systems worldwide. To quickly identify successful diagnostic and therapeutic approaches large data sharing approaches are inevitable. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, many of them are available only in isolated silos and largely inaccessible to external researchers. To overcome and tackle this challenge the university medicine network (comprising all 36 German university hospitals) has been founded in April 2020 to coordinate COVID-19 action plans, diagnostic and therapeutic strategies and collaborative research activities. 13 projects were initiated from which the CODEX project, aiming at the development of a Germany-wide Covid-19 Data Exchange Platform, is presented in this publication. We illustrate the conceptual design, the stepwise development and deployment, first results and the current status.

[A registry of registries and cohorts: recommendations for metadata and policies]

Registries and cohort studies play a central role in patient-oriented medical research, in particular in health services research. In order to increase the transparency about ongoing registries and cohort studies in Germany, and to promote communication and cooperation between the drivers in the field a so-called register portal should be established. Metadata are characteristics that are used to describe registries and cohort studies in the register portal. A limited set of characteristics, the core set, should correctly describe the projects on the one hand while reducing workload for data capture and data administration on the other hand. The core set consists of 26 data elements that had been defined in a Delphi-consensus process involving experts from the working group registries of the German Network for Health Services Research (DNVF) and the working group IT infrastructure and quality management of the Technology, Methods, and Infrastructure for Networked Medical Research (TMF). Transparent policies are required to guarantee traceability and reliability of the portal's services. Six so-called top-level-tasks and 37 use cases were defined in an interim report so far. The metadata have been agreed upon by most of the member associations of the DNVF. Metadata and rules of procedures are the starting point for the practical implementation of the register portal in the next future.

IT Infrastructure Components for Biobanking

OBJECTIVE

Within translational research projects in the recent years large biobanks have been established, mostly supported by homegrown, proprietary software solutions. No general requirements for biobanking IT infrastructures have been published yet. This paper presents an exemplary biobanking IT architecture, a requirements specification for a biorepository management tool and exemplary illustrations of three major types of requirements.

METHODS

We have pursued a comprehensive literature review for biobanking IT solutions and established an interdisciplinary expert panel for creating the requirements specification. The exemplary illustrations were derived from a requirements analysis within two university hospitals.

RESULTS

The requirements specification comprises a catalog with more than 130 detailed requirements grouped into 3 major categories and 20 subcategories. Special attention is given to multitenancy capabilities in order to support the project-specific definition of varying research and bio-banking contexts, the definition of workflows to track sample processing, sample transportation and sample storage and the automated integration of preanalytic handling and storage robots.

CONCLUSION

IT support for biobanking projects can be based on a federated architectural framework comprising primary data sources for clinical annotations, a pseudonymization service, a clinical data warehouse with a flexible and user-friendly query interface and a biorepository management system. Flexibility and scalability of all such components are vital since large medical facilities such as university hospitals will have to support biobanking for varying monocentric and multicentric research scenarios and multiple medical clients.