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ORCHESTRA final meeting
On November 7 and 8, the final ORCHESTRA conference took place in Verona, Italy. The project, funded by the European Commission, ran for four years and was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic to generate new knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 infection. It involves a network of 37 partners from Europe and beyond.
ORCHESTRA provided important insights into the virus and influenced public health measures across Europe. The Berlin Institute of Health at Charité (BIH) contributed to the creation of new knowledge and improved pandemic preparedness through the standardization and harmonization of data. International standard terminologies such as SNOMED CT, LOINC, ATC, ICD and NCIt were used to ensure semantic interoperability between the different studies and languages.
More than 3,700 variables and their associated response value sets from different studies were examined for international standard coding. Variables that appeared in two or more studies were identified as ORCHESTRA core data elements for COVID-19 (OcDeC) and published on the ART-DECOR platform. In addition, over 300 new codes were requested and obtained from standard development organizations for concepts related to COVID-19 as well as for sociological and psychological questionnaires related to the time of the pandemic.
These codes are now available for reuse worldwide. In addition, BIH developed the ORCHESTRA Pseudonymization Tool (OPT), which is used to pseudonymize large data sets and can be quickly deployed in many institutions.