gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: The German COVID-19 Research “Network of University Medicine” (NUM) was founded as a network of all German university hospitals to improve the general availability of relevant routine and research data to enable the best possible treatment of COVID-19 patients [1]. The COVID-19 Data Exchange Platform “CODEX” was one of the thirteen initial NUM projects and was mainly focused on the development of a secure and interoperable research infrastructure for the storage and provision of COVID-19 research datasets [2]. The follow-up project CODEX+ continued to pursue solutions from already completed NUM projects to expand the existing infrastructure. Work package 3.3 of CODEX+, which was coordinated by the NUM partner sites Frankfurt and Aachen, focused on the integration with other NUM projects, especially CODEX, RACOON, AKTIN and NATON [3].

Methods: Using previous findings from the Frankfurt site, the goal of work package 3.3 was to evaluate whether and to what extent the networking between the NUM projects was already being applied in order to improve the further collaboration of the projects [4]. Therefore, an anonymized survey, using the open source online statistical survey web app “LimeSurvey”, was used to conduct the survey with all 11 participating sites in work package 3.3. [5]. The survey, which covered 49 different types of questions, addressed both technical and medical staff. Survey participants were asked general questions about their site as well as specific questions about their cooperation with other NUM projects.

Results: Participants of the survey were primarily technical staff responsible for the NUM projects CODEX and RACOON at their respective site. Survey participants assessed the workload regarding the curation of data as medium to high and also rated the importance of a congruent information model as high. They most commonly identified a synergy effect in the exchange of data between CODEX and RACOON as well as between AKTIN and CODEX. It is important to note that not all questions were fully answered by participants, but individual responses revealed that collaboration already existed in the implementation of NUM project goals.

Discussion: Many participants completed the initial questions in detail, but in subsequent questions the level of detail decreased significantly. Moreover, the majority of the responses were incomplete which made it considerably more difficult to properly evaluate the survey. Due to this fact, it is difficult to speculate why more technical than medical staff participated in the survey. The numerous complete questions on the other hand are very valuable for the evaluation of the survey, for example the importance of a congruent information model and that they were already collaborations between partner sites and synergy effects between several NUM projects.

Conclusion: The survey provided a valuable initial overview resulting in important key figures and requirements, such as an increased need for synergy and collaboration regarding future NUM projects. In addition, the results of this survey could help other researchers and project participants by contributing to the development of more effective strategies for managing and coordinating future NUM and research projects.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.