Search

The German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) is one of the German Centres for Health Research and aims to conduct early and guideline-relevant studies to develop new therapies and diagnostics that impact the lives of people with cardiovascular disease. Therefore, DZHK members designed a collaboratively organised and integrated research platform connecting all sites and partners. The overarching objectives of the research platform are the standardisation of prospective data and biological sample collections among all studies and the development of a sustainable centrally standardised storage in compliance with general legal regulations and the FAIR principles. The main elements of the DZHK infrastructure are web-based and central units for data management, LIMS, IDMS, and transfer office, embedded in a framework consisting of the DZHK Use and Access Policy, and the Ethics and Data Protection Concept. This framework is characterised by a modular design allowing a high standardisation across all studies. For studies that require even tighter criteria additional quality levels are defined. In addition, the Public Open Data strategy is an important focus of DZHK. The DZHK operates as one legal entity holding all rights of data and biological sample usage, according to the DZHK Use and Access Policy. All DZHK studies collect a basic set of data and biosamples, accompanied by specific clinical and imaging data and biobanking. The DZHK infrastructure was constructed by scientists with the focus on the needs of scientists conducting clinical studies. Through this, the DZHK enables the interdisciplinary and multiple use of data and biological samples by scientists inside and outside the DZHK. So far, 27 DZHK studies recruited well over 11,200 participants suffering from major cardiovascular disorders such as myocardial infarction or heart failure. Currently, data and samples of five DZHK studies of the DZHK Heart Bank can be applied for.

ZusammenfassungZiel der Studie „Real world“-Daten aus der ambulanten Gesundheitsversorgung sind in Deutschland nur schwer systematisch und longitudinal zu erlangen. Unsere Vision ist eine permanente Datenablage mit repräsentativen, de-identifizierten Patienten- und Versorgungsdaten, längsschnittlich, fortwährend aktualisiert und von verschiedenen Versorgern, mit der Möglichkeit zur Verknüpfung mit weiteren Daten, etwa aus Patientenbefragungen oder biologischer Forschung, zugänglich für andere Forscher. Wir berichten methodische Vorgehensweisen und Ergebnisse aus dem RADAR Projekt.Methodik Untersuchung des Rechtsrahmens, Entwicklung prototypischer technischer Abläufe und Lösungen, mit Machbarkeitsstudie zur Evaluation von technischer und inhaltlicher Funktionalität sowie Eignung für Fragestellungen der Versorgungsforschung.Ergebnisse Ab 2016 entwickelte ein interdisziplinäres Wissenschaftlerteam ein Datenschutzkonzept für Exporte von Versorgungsdaten aus elektronischen Praxisverwaltungssystemen. Eine technische und organisatorische Forschungsinfrastruktur im ambulanten Sektor wurden entwickelt und im Anwendungsfall „Orale Antikoagulation“ (OAK) umgesetzt. In 7 niedersächsischen Hausarztpraxen wurden 100 Patienten gewonnen und nach informierter Einwilligung ihre ausgewählten Behandlungsdaten, reduziert auf 40 relevante Datenfelder, über die Behandlungsdatentransfer-Schnittstelle extrahiert, unmittelbar vor Ort in identifizierende bzw. medizinische Daten getrennt und verschlüsselt zur Treuhandstelle (THS) bzw. an den Datenhalter übertragen. 75 Patienten, die die Einschlusskriterien erfüllten (mind. 1 Jahr Behandlung mit OAK), erhielten einen Lebensqualitäts-Fragebogen über die THS per Post. Von 66 Rücksendungen wurden 63 Fragebogenergebnisse mit den Behandlungsdaten in der Datenablage verknüpft.Schlussfolgerung Die rechtskonforme Machbarkeit der Gewinnung von pseudonymisierten hausärztlichen Routinedaten mit expliziter informierter Patienteneinwilligung und deren wissenschaftliche Nutzung einschließlich Re-Kontaktierung und Einbindung von Fragebogendaten konnte nachgewiesen werden. Die Schutzkonzepte Privacy by design und Datenminimierung (Artikel 25 mit Erwägungsgrund 78 DSGVO) wurden systematisch in das RADAR Projekt integriert und begründen wesentlich, dass der Machbarkeitsnachweis rechtskonformer Primärdatengewinnung und sekundärer Nutzung für Forschungszwecke gelang. Eine Nutzung hinreichend anonymisierter, aber noch sinnvoller hausärztlicher Gesundheitsdaten ohne individuelle Einwilligung ist im bestehenden Rechtsrahmen in Deutschland schwerlich umsetzbar.

Background The Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) funds a network of university medicines (NUM) to support COVID-19 and pandemic research at national level. The “COVID-19 Data Exchange Platform” (CODEX) as part of NUM establishes a harmonised infrastructure that supports decentral but standardised provision as well as federated combination and research use of COVID-19 datasets. The broad consent (BC) of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) is agreed by all German federal states and forms the legal base for such data processing. All 34 participating university hospitals (NUM sites) work upon a harmonised infrastructural as well as legal basis for their data protection-compliant collection and transfer of their research dataset to the central CODEX platform. Each NUM site ensures that the exchanged consent information conforms to the already-balloted HL7® FHIR® consent profiles and the interoperability concept of the MII Task Force “Consent Implementation” (TFCI). The Independent Trusted Third-Party (TTP) of the University Medicine Greifswald successfully supports data protection-compliant data processing in various research projects since 2014 and provides the consent management solutions gICS®, which supports fully digital and paper-based consent management. Results A “TTP-FHIR Gateway” for the HL7® FHIR®-compliant exchange of consent information using gICS® throughout NUM-CODEX was implemented and provided to all NUM sites in June 2021 as a separate software component. The gateway relies on the gICS® application logic. All FHIR® functionalities comply with the already-balloted FHIR® consent profiles of the HL7® Working Group Consent Management. A pre-configured consent template for the BC is provided to all NUM sites, thereby simplifying the technical BC rollout and the corresponding implementation of the TFCI interoperability concept at the NUM sites. Conclusions This article proves that a HL7® FHIR®-compliant and interoperable nationwide exchange of consent information could be built using of the consent management software gICS® and the provided TTP-FHIR Gateway. The initial functional scope of the solution covers the requirements identified in the NUM-CODEX setting. The semantic correctness of these functionalities was validated by project-partners from the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. The production rollout of the solution package to all NUM sites has started successfully.

Background Defining and protecting participants’ rights is the aim of several ethical codices and legal regulations. According to these regulations, the Informed Consent (IC) is an inevitable element of research with human subjects. In the era of “big data medicine”, aspects of IC become even more relevant since research becomes more complex rendering compliance with legal and ethical regulations increasingly difficult. Methods Based on literature research and practical experiences gathered by the Institute for Community Medicine (ICM), University Medicine Greifswald, requirements for digital consent management systems were identified. Results To address the requirements, the free-of-charge, open-source software “generic Informed Consent Service” (gICS®) was developed by ICM to provide a tool to facilitate and enhance usage of digital ICs for the international research community covering various scenarios. gICS facilitates IC management based on IC modularisation and supports various workflows within research, including (1) electronic depiction of paper-based consents and (2) fully electronic consents. Numerous projects applied gICS and documented over 336,000 ICs and 2400 withdrawals since 2014. Discussion Since the consent’s content is a prerequisite for securing participants’ rights, application of gICS is no guarantee for legal compliance. However, gICS supports fine-granular consents and accommodation of differentiated consent states, which can be directly exchanged between systems, allowing automated data processing. Conclusion gICS simplifies and supports sustained IC management as a major key to successfully conduct studies and build trust in research with human subjects. Therefore, interested researchers are invited to use gICS and provide feedback for further improvements.

Background The identity management is a central component in medical research. Patients are recruited from various sites, which requires an error tolerant record linkage method, to ensure that patients are registered only once. In large research projects or institutions, the identity management has to deal with several thousands or millions of patients. In environments with large numbers of patients the register process could lead to high runtimes caused by record linkage. The Central Biomaterial Bank of the Charité (ZeBanC) searched for an identity management solution, which can handle millions of patients in large research projects with an acceptable performance. The goal of this paper was to simulate the registration of several million patients using the E-PIX service at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. The E-PIX service was evaluated in terms of needed runtimes, memory requirements, and processor utilization. A total of at least 20 million patients had to be registered. The runtimes to register patients into databases with various sizes should be examined, and the maximum number of patients, which the E-PIX service could handle, should be determined. Methods Tools were set up or developed to measure the needed runtimes, the memory used and the processor usage to register patients into various sizes of databases. To generate runtimes close to reality, modified patient data based on transposed real patient data were used for the simulation. The transposed patient data were sent to E-PIX to measure the runtimes of the registration process. This measurement was repeated for various database sizes. Results E-PIX is suitable to manage multi-million patients within a dataset. With the given hardware, it was possible to register a total of more than 30 million patients. It was possible to register more than 16 thousand patients per day into this database. Conclusions The E-PIX tool fulfills the requirements of the Charité to be used for large research projects. The use of E-PIX is intended for the research context in the Charité.

BackgroundThe Federal Ministry of Research and Education funded the Network of University Medicine for establishing an infrastructure for pandemic research. This includes the development of a COVID-19 Data Exchange Platform (CODEX) that provides standardised and harmonised data sets for COVID-19 research. Nearly all university hospitals in Germany are part of the project and transmit medical data from the local data integration centres to the CODEX platform. The medical data on a person that has been collected at several sites is to be made available on the CODEX platform in a merged form. To enable this, a federated trusted third party (fTTP) will be established, which will allow the pseudonymised merging of the medical data. The fTTP implements privacy preserving record linkage based on Bloom filters and assigns pseudonyms to enable re-pseudonymisation during data transfer to the CODEX platform.ResultsThe fTTP was implemented conceptually and technically. For this purpose, the processes that are necessary for data delivery were modelled. The resulting communication relationships were identified and corresponding interfaces were specified. These were developed according to the specifications in FHIR and validated with the help of external partners. Existing tools such as the identity management system E-PIX® were further developed accordingly so that sites can generate Bloom filters based on person identifying information. An extension for the comparison of Bloom filters was implemented for the federated trust third party. The correct implementation was shown in the form of a demonstrator and the connection of two data integration centres.ConclusionsThis article describes how the fTTP was modelled and implemented. In a first expansion stage, the fTTP was exemplarily connected through two sites and its functionality was demonstrated. Further expansion stages, which are already planned, have been technically specified and will be implemented in the future in order to also handle cases in which the privacy preserving record linkage achieves ambiguous results. The first expansion stage of the fTTP is available in the University Medicine network and will be connected by all participating sites in the ongoing test phase.

Objectives It is difficult to obtain longitudinal 'real world' data from ambulatory medical care in Germany in a systematic way. Our vision is a large German research data repository featuring representative, anonymized patient and outpatient health care data, longitudinal, continuously updated and across different providers, offering a perspective of linking secondary care data or additional data obtained from research cohorts, for example patient reported data or biodata, and will be accessible for other researchers. Here we report specific methods and results from the RADAR project.Methods Survey of legislation, design of technical processes and organisational solutions, with a feasibility study to evaluate technical and content functionality, acceptability and performance fitness for health services research questions.Results In 2016, a multi-disciplinary scientific team initiated the development of a privacy protection and IT security concept for data exported from the electronic medical records (EMR) of physicians' practices in line with the European General Data Protection Regulation. Technical and organisational requirements for lawful research infrastructure were developed and executed for use in a specific case, namely ̒oral anticoagulation'. In 7 Lower Saxonian general practices, 100 patients were selected by their physician and their data - reduced to 40 essential data fields - extracted from EMR via a mandatory software interface after informed consent. Still in the practice, the data were split into identifying or medical data. These were encrypted and transferred either to a trusted third party (TTP) or to a data repository, respectively. 75 patients who met our inclusion criteria (minimum of one year of oral anticoagulation treatment) received a quality-of-life questionnaire via the TTP. Of the 66 returns, 63 responses were then linked to the EMR data in the repository.Conclusion Results from RADAR project proved the technical and organisational feasibility of lawful, pseudonymised data acquisition and the linkage of questionnaires to EMR data. The protecting concepts privacy by design and data minimization (Art. 25 GDPR with Recital 78) were implemented. Without informed consent, secondary use of routine data from ambulatory care which are sufficiently anonymized but still meaningful is all but impossible under current German law.Ziel der Studie „Real world“-Daten aus der ambulanten Gesundheitsversorgung sind in Deutschland nur schwer systematisch und longitudinal zu erlangen. Unsere Vision ist eine permanente Datenablage mit repräsentativen, de-identifizierten Patienten- und Versorgungsdaten, längsschnittlich, fortwährend aktualisiert und von verschiedenen Versorgern, mit der Möglichkeit zur Verknüpfung mit weiteren Daten, etwa aus Patientenbefragungen oder biologischer Forschung, zugänglich für andere Forscher. Wir berichten methodische Vorgehensweisen und Ergebnisse aus dem RADAR Projekt.Methodik Untersuchung des Rechtsrahmens, Entwicklung prototypischer technischer Abläufe und Lösungen, mit Machbarkeitsstudie zur Evaluation von technischer und inhaltlicher Funktionalität sowie Eignung für Fragestellungen der Versorgungsforschung.Ergebnisse Ab 2016 entwickelte ein interdisziplinäres Wissenschaftlerteam ein Datenschutzkonzept für Exporte von Versorgungsdaten aus elektronischen Praxisverwaltungssystemen. Eine technische und organisatorische Forschungsinfrastruktur im ambulanten Sektor wurden entwickelt und im Anwendungsfall „Orale Antikoagulation“ (OAK) umgesetzt. In 7 niedersächsischen Hausarztpraxen wurden 100 Patienten gewonnen und nach informierter Einwilligung ihre ausgewählten Behandlungsdaten, reduziert auf 40 relevante Datenfelder, über die Behandlungsdatentransfer-Schnittstelle extrahiert, unmittelbar vor Ort in identifizierende bzw. medizinische Daten getrennt und verschlüsselt zur Treuhandstelle (THS) bzw. an den Datenhalter übertragen. 75 Patienten, die die Einschlusskriterien erfüllten (mind. 1 Jahr Behandlung mit OAK), erhielten einen Lebensqualitäts-Fragebogen über die THS per Post. Von 66 Rücksendungen wurden 63 Fragebogenergebnisse mit den Behandlungsdaten in der Datenablage verknüpft.Schlussfolgerung Die rechtskonforme Machbarkeit der Gewinnung von pseudonymisierten hausärztlichen Routinedaten mit expliziter informierter Patienteneinwilligung und deren wissenschaftliche Nutzung einschließlich Re-Kontaktierung und Einbindung von Fragebogendaten konnte nachgewiesen werden. Die Schutzkonzepte Privacy by design und Datenminimierung (Artikel 25 mit Erwägungsgrund 78 DSGVO) wurden systematisch in das RADAR Projekt integriert und begründen wesentlich, dass der Machbarkeitsnachweis rechtskonformer Primärdatengewinnung und sekundärer Nutzung für Forschungszwecke gelang. Eine Nutzung hinreichend anonymisierter, aber noch sinnvoller hausärztlicher Gesundheitsdaten ohne individuelle Einwilligung ist im bestehenden Rechtsrahmen in Deutschland schwerlich umsetzbar.

Background The consent management is an essential component for supporting the implementation of consents and withdrawals and thus, the realisation of patient’s rights. In MIRACUM, one of the four consortia of the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII), ten university hospitals intend to integrate the generic Informed Consent Service® (gICS) in their Data Integration Center (DIC). To provide a tool that supports the local workflows of the MIRACUM sites, the gICS should be improved. Methods We used three standardised questionnaires with 46 questions to elicit requirements from the ten sites. Each site answered the questions from the current and the desired future perspective. This made it possible to understand the individual processes at each site and it was possible to identify features and improvements that were generally necessary. Results The results of the survey were classified according to their impact on the gICS. Feature requests of new functionalities, improvements of already implemented functionalities and conceptual support for implementing processes were identified. This is the basis for an improved gICS release to support the ten sites’ individual consent management processes. Conclusions A release plan for the feature requests and improvements was coordinated with all sites. All sites have confirmed that the implementation of these features and enhancements will support their software-based consent management processes.

Background The use of medical data for research purposes requires an informed consent of the patient that is compliant with the EU General Data Protection Regulation. In the context of multi-centre research initiatives and a multitude of clinical and epidemiological studies scalable and automatable measures for digital consent management are required. Modular form, structure, and contents render a patient’s consent reusable for varying project settings in order to effectively manage and minimise organisational and technical efforts. Results Within the DFG-funded project “MAGIC” (Grant Number HO 1937/5-1) the digital consent management service tool gICS was enhanced to comply with the recommendations published in the TMF data protection guideline for medical research. In addition, a structured exchange format for modular consent templates considering established standards and formats in the area of digital informed consent management was designed. Using the new FHIR standard and the HAPI FHIR library, the first version for an exchange format and necessary import-/export-functionalities were successfully implemented. Conclusions The proposed exchange format is a “work in progress”. It represents a starting point for current discussions concerning digital consent management. It also attempts to improve interoperability between different approaches within the wider IHE-/HL7-/FHIR community. Independent of the exchange format, providing the possibility to export, modify and import templates for consents and withdrawals to be reused in similar clinical and epidemiological studies is an essential precondition for the sustainable operation of digital consent management.