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NUM CODEX - Covid-19 Data Exchange Plattform

The „Covid-19 Data Exchange Platform“-project, short CODEX, is one of 13 nationwide projects belonging to the German Network of University Medicine (NUM) which has received financing from the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) since August of 2020. CODEX is following the goal of establishing a nationwide, uniform infrastructure that complies with data privacy laws and follows FAIR principles for the storage and provision of Covid-19-related research data sets. The CODEX architecture will be comprised of: 

  • decentralized components (so called “NUM-nodes”) and a  

  • central component 

that are linked and support the mission of making research data sets available based on access rules. These two components are supplemented by a central search portal that enables data and specimen queries. The decentralized NUM-nodes use the existing infrastructure of the Medical informatics initiative (MII), in particular the data integration centers that have been set up at almost all of the German university hospitals.  

Complimentary to the central pseudonymized research data repositories, the CODEX platform is also developing interfaces based on the interoperability standards HL7 FHIR® (R4) to connect other healthcare applications to the platform. The interfaces are validating incoming data with regards to their structural and semantic interoperability.  

The MII has already defined a core data set which has been implemented within the data integration centers. In addition to that data set, CODEX partners will also provide research data sets in form of the „German Corona Consensus Data Set“ (GECCO). The GECCO (current version: 1.0.4) contains 83 data elements und uses FHIR® as its exchange standard.

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