NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19:
Better understanding the COVID-19 outbreak and its consequences through integrated and harmonized research efforts

Background
Against this background, we have extended the National Research Data Infrastructure for Personal Health Data (NFDI4Health) work programme by a further use case “NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19” and set up a nationwide COVID-19 research information and guidance infrastructure. NFDI4Health with its strong public health community provides the necessary structures to address the shortcomings mentioned above. It integrates major German institutions experienced as methodology developers, data holders and analysts.
Overarching goals
The overarching goals of the NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 are to strengthen harmonized medical, epidemiological and public health related research and to improve prospects for informing stakeholders on research results. Contrary to other initiatives in the medical sciences, we focus on public health consequences of the pandemic outbreak such as morbidity, mortality, health care utilization, and effects of social isolation.
First results
The project results will be summarized and published in a blueprint paper “Covering future pandemics”.
Funding
The NFDI4Health Task Force COVID-19 will be funded by the German Research Fundation (project number 451265285) until June 2023.
Cooperation with other (COVID 19) initiatives
To achieve our goals, we closely collaborate with other national institutions and initiatives such as Nationales Forschungsnetzwerk der Universitätsmedizin (NUM), the German National Cohort (GNC) and the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). We are in active exchange with international initiatives such as RDA, FAIRSharing, FAIRDOM or Go FAIR.

Prof. Dr. Iris Pigeot
Phone: +49 (0)421 218-56942
Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS GmbH
Achterstraße 30
D-28359 Bremen
