Tasks and goals

All activities of the Network of University Medicine (NUM) contribute to the following three overarching goals:

• Establish a nationwide, comprehensive study and data space for clinical research that includes data from routine patient care documentation as well as additional data collected, for example, in prospective clinical and clinical-epidemiological
  studies
• Prepare the biomedical research landscape for future pandemics and other major public health crises
• Create a central point of contact for clinical research at a national level that provides stakeholders with fast and efficient access to all academic medical centres in Germany

In order to achieve these goals, the NUM facilitates cooperative research activities in clinical research and preparation for major public health crises involving as many of the 36 academic medical centres as possible. These large collaborative projects should be interdisciplinary in nature and generate findings of direct practical relevance. The basis for the conception and realisation of such collaborative projects is to bring together the community of clinical researchers in a national platform.

Collaborative projects involving many academic  medical centres are only possible if research infrastructure, in particular data infrastructure, is available that can be used across all sites. This must be optimised to meet the needs of the researchers.

The NUM has therefore established various research infrastructures in close collaboration with partners such as the German Centre for Cardiovascular Research (DZHK) and the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII). They contribute to better preparation for new pandemics and other major public health crises. In the event of a crisis, they enable data to be consolidated and large research projects to be initiated without unnecessary time loss. The aim is to operate and further develop the created platforms on a permanent basis so that they can also be used immediately in the event of a crisis.

In order to avoid parallel structures and developments, the NUM utilises existing research projects and infrastructures as far as possible by integrating and consolidating already established and successful structures. In this way, the NUM contributes to the "defragmentation" of the highly fragmented German medical research landscape, creates synergies and scales up existing research activities.

The NUM is committed to the concept of open science in all its activities. The research data available at the NUM should therefore be widely accessible to the scientific community. To this end, the NUM implements the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) principles when handling research data. In addition, the NUM's research infrastructures should be made available for use by third parties as far as possible so that they can carry out their multi-centre research projects on NUM platforms.