Making Epidemiological and Clinical Studies FAIR Using the Example of COVID-19

FAIRification of personal health data is of utmost importance to improve health research and political as well as medical decision-making, which ultimately contributes to a better health of the general population. Despite the many advances in information technology, several obstacles such as interoperability problems remain and relevant research on the health topic of interest is likely to be missed out due to time-consuming search and access processes. A recent example is the COVID-19 pandemic, where a better understanding of the virus’ transmission dynamics as well as preventive and therapeutic options would have improved public health and medical decision-making. Consequently, the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 was established to foster the FAIRification of German COVID-19 studies. This paper describes the various steps that have been taken to create low barrier workflows for scientists in finding and accessing German COVID-19 research. It provides an overview on the building blocks for FAIR health research within the Task Force COVID-19 and how this initial work was subsequently expanded by the German consortium National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) to cover a wider range of studies and research areas in epidemiological, public health and clinical research. Lessons learned from the Task Force helped to improve the respective tasks of NFDI4Health.