NFDI4Health at the NUM Convention 2025

Learn more...

Project funding Local Data Hubs 2025

Learn more...

NFDI4Health and EHDS

Learn more...

NFDI4Health

National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data 

News

Events

What is NFDI4Health?

NFDI4Health – the National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data – deals with data generated in clinical trials, epidemiological and public health studies. The collection and analysis of these data on health and disease status and important factors influencing it are an essential component for the development of new therapies, comprehensive care approaches and preventive measures in a modern health care system. Although these data already meet high content quality standards, they often do not fulfil the requirements of the FAIR principles:

  • The findability of data is often limited due to the lack of international standards for registration and publication.
  • Possibilities for data use by third parties are usually unclear.
  • Databases are often not interoperable, e.g. due to the great methodological heterogeneity in the recording of exposures and health endpoints.
  • Furthermore, privacy requirements and informed consent of study participants restrict the reuse of data.

Task Areas

TA1 - Coordination

TA1 focuses on project coordination measures including overall project financial controlling, dissemination, public relations and outreach to political decision makers. Read more

TA2 - Standards for FAIR Data

TA2 evaluates and develops standards for findability and interoperability. This concerns data management and publication policies, (meta-)data standard harmonization, data quality assessment as well as standardization of health data access. Read more

TA3 - Services

TA3 uses the standards provided by TA2 to deliver NFDI4Health services, service enabling tools and the necessary technical support. These include a central search service, tools supporting data quality assessments and metadata annotations. They also include services for data use and access, as well as data/software repositories and archiving services. Moreover, TA3 offers advanced distributed data analysis services. Read more

TA4 - Community & Networking

TA4 addresses the needs and demands of the scientific community, informs and trains our user community and organizes community participation by disseminating tools and knowledge to and triggering feedback from the community. Read more 

TA5 - Use Cases

TA5 implements the standards and services developed in TA2 and 3 in thematic use cases which cover a broad range of needs expressed by the user community during the planning phase of NFDI4Health. Each use case will serve as an example for a specific challenge for FAIRification of personal health data. Based on these use cases, we will develop and apply practical solutions that will facilitate the whole process from findability to reuse. Read more

TA6 - Privacy & Data Access in Concert

TA6 is concerned with the legal framework conditions (EU GDPR) of data protection and data privacy, secure record linkage and solutions such as broad consent and differential privacy, e.g., via simulation of synthetic health data. Read more

Participation

This image for Image Layouts addon

Community

We strongly believe that active community involvement is crucial to develop the best solutions to NFDI4Health challenges. Learn more about our activities here.
Read more
This image for Image Layouts addon

Citizen Science

NFDI4Health is currently setting up four projects in the field of citizen science. The aim is to reduce fears of data use through intensive exchange with interested citizens.
Read more

Our Services

Health Study Hub

The German Central Health Study Hub allows researchers to publish their project characteristics, documents and data related to their research project in a FAIR manner or to find information about past and ongoing studies.

Data Train

The Data Train cross-disciplinary graduate training programme, a core element of the NFDI4Health training approach, aims at building the next generation of data-savvy researchers in the biomedical sciences.

Personal Health Train

To foster data-driven innovation in medicine, we developed a distributed analysis infrastructure that enables research on sensitive data without prior data sharing while supporting diverse data formats.

Local Data Hub

The LDH is the local node in the federated concept of NFDI4Health. We develop and promote the dissemination of a unified data sharing platform based on the FAIR principles in line with the NFDI4Health standards.

Data publication

Health data, as collected in clinical trials and epidemiological, as well as public health studies, cannot be freely published, but are valuable datasets whose reuse is of high importance for health research. NFDI4Health has established a metadata standard and process for the publication of health studies to make health data FAIR.

Data harmonisation

To make health studies and their data FAIR we have developed guidelines and standards for metadata description and data sharing. We have developed data publication guidelines, common metadata description standards and adaptations of health data interoperability standards to harmonize the description of studies and their corresponding metadata.

Data Quality Assessment

It is a paradox: on the one hand, good scientific work depends on high data quality. On the other hand, a lot of effort is put into the design and conduct of studies, but not into data quality assessments. We help to facilitate the efficient performance of such assessments with versatile concepts and tools

DataSHIELD

Expansion of decentralised research projects with DataSHIELD: Until now, data protection concerns and the lack of special IT infrastructure have prevented the expansion of cross-institutional research projects. DataSHIELD is intended to solve that problem.

Our Partners

ZB MED
BIPS
DIFE
Fraunhofer
HITS
KKSN
MDC
RKI
TMF
Universität Bonn
Uni Bremen
Universität Leipzig
HS Mittweida
Universitätsmedizin Göttingen
Unimedizin Greifswald
BIH
USB Köln

Funding

The partners of the NFDI consortium NFDI4Health are funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the “Agreement between the Federal Government and the Länder Concerning the Establishment and Funding of a National Research Data Infrastructure” of 26 November 2018. To coordinate the activities, the partners of NFDI4Health participate as far as possible as members in the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) e. V. association and participate in the various bodies and other structures of the association in accordance with its statutes.

Image
We use cookies

We use cookies on our website. Some of them are essential for the operation of the site, while others help us to improve this site and the user experience (tracking cookies). You can decide for yourself whether you want to allow cookies or not. Please note that if you reject them, you may not be able to use all the functionalities of the site.