Data Publication for Personalised Health Data A New Publication Standard Introduced by NFDI4Health

Abstract

Health data collected in clinical trials and epidemiological as well as public health studies cannot be freely published, but are valuable datasets whose subsequent use is of high importance for health research. The National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) aims to promote the publication of such health data without compromising privacy. Based on existing international standards, NFDI4Health has established a generic information model for the description and preservation of high-level metadata describing health-related studies, covering both clinical and epidemiological studies. As an infrastructure for publishing such preservation metadata as well as more detailed representation information of study data (e.g. questionaries and data dictionaries), NFDI4Health has developed the German Central Health Study Hub. Content is either harvested from existing distributed sources or entered directly via a user interface. This metadata makes health studies more discoverable, and researchers can use the published metadata to evaluate the content of data collections, learn about access conditions and how and where to request data access. The goal of NFDI4Health is to establish interoperable and internationally accepted standards and processes for the publication of health data sets to make health data FAIR.