Start of the coordinated ethics procedure for the National Autopsy Registry (NAREG)

Most recently, the German COVID-19 autopsy registry (DeRegCOVID) played a central role in the infrastructure of the National Autopsy Network NATON by serving as the electronic backbone of research. The registry is now to be extended to other use cases beyond COVID-19 and transferred to the National Autopsy Registry (NAREG), which is why the coordinated ethics procedure for NAREG was launched in August 2023 with 24 ethics committees initially involved. The GDNG was passed during the ongoing process. The law represents a nationwide regulation to make health data usable for research. Under certain conditions, the new law enables pseudonymised register entry without consent.
With this positive ethics vote, NAREG is doing pioneering work and is the first register in Germany to be based on the GDNG in terms of data utilisation.