The many years of experience gathered by the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) with regards to data protection compliant acquisition of clinical data, diagnostic images and samples are now also being used for the German Covid-19 research.
The DZHK provides its research platform for the National Pandemic Cohort Network (NAPKON) until spring 2021. „NAPKON is one of 13 projects of the Network University Medicine (NUM) on Covid-19 research, which is funded by the German government with 150 million Euros.“ NAPKON aims to collect data from Covid-19 patients and make it usable for research.
The Independent Trusted Third Party of the University Medicine Greifswald is responsible for processing patients‘ personal identifying data, managing pseudonyms and consents. Collecting consents is often still done on paper in everyday clinical practice, but can now be conducted completely digitally using the tools of the Trusted Third Party Greifswald. The up-to-the-minute provision of a patient’s digital consent status ensures data protection compliant release of data and samples beyond institution boundaries and significantly supports research.
Source: https://dzhk.de/aktuelles/news/artikel/dzhk-stellt-dateninfrastruktur-fuer-coronaforschung-bereit/, Accessed on 2020-12-07
