Short Description
Key results of Project 1 ‚Data Base Development, Management & Privacy‘ were to answer the question, how and in which format health-care data, posing the base for all other research and applied problems of dexhelpp, can be made accessible to all research partners in a secure way. Hereby the focus was laid on the development of a common research-server, accessible by all partners and posing for a common secure data source and computing environment.
Completed Objectives and Methods Developed
Development of a common research-server.
Although most data used for research in dexhelpp is very sensitive it nevertheless needs to be available for the partners. Hence it was necessary to establish a common data source and a common work-protocol to deal with confidential data. For this we installed a common research platform in form of a computing server containing all necessary data. Main asset of the server is that data can be made available to partners for working on the server. Hence data accessed on the system must and cannot be downloaded for local use.
Established new data structures.
Due to different data formats, measurement methods and data sources health care data is very heterogeneous and moreover underlies different security regulations. Hence the integration of data to the server was very challenging. Here we utilized so called record-linkage, i.e. identifying and joining similar data from different sources.
Established the necessary level of security.
Besides different security concepts for the login of the dexhelpp partners to the server especially data security poses a big challenge for the installation of the research server. Hereby state-of-the-art fingerprinting concepts are used to document every – legal or illegal – use of data briefly noting their identity.
Data-evalutaion and query
Caused by the joined health records a huge amount of data is managed on the server. Hence a big part of Project 1 dealt with solving the question, how these gigantic data structures can be made accessible to partners in small portions.