The German Central Health Study Hub is a platform that serves two different kinds of users. First, it allows scientists and data holding organizations (data producers) to publish their project characteristics, documents and data related to their research endeavour in a FAIR manner. Obviously, patient-level data cannot be shared publicly, however, metadata describing the patient-level data along with information about data access can be shared via the platform (preservation description information). The other kind of user is a scientist or researcher (data consumer) that likes to find information about past and ongoing studies and is interested in reusing existing patient-level data for their project. To summarize, the platforms connect data providers with data consumers in the domain of clinical, public health and epidemiologic health research to foster reuse.
The platform aggregates and harmonizes information already entered in various public repositories such as DRKS, clinicaltrials.gov, WHO ICTRP to provide a holistic view of the German research landscape in the aforementioned research areas. In addition, data stewards actively collect available information from (public) resources such as websites that cannot be automatically integrated.
The service started during the COVID-19 pandemic.