Social and contextual factors such as occupation, poverty or housing conditions play a role on many levels: according to current studies, they influence both the risk of contracting the disease and the course of COVID-19 and ultimately also how society deals with the pandemic. A better understanding of these factors can help to design general and target group-specific prevention approaches and clinical treatment concepts in line with requirements in order to better protect vulnerable groups with an increased risk of a severe or fatal course of the disease. This project combined the existing expertise at the university hospitals for collecting and analysing social and contextual data and made it available as a readily available resource for the numerous research projects of the Network University Medicine. The aim was to compile a set of instruments that could be used to record social and contextual factors in a low-cost and valid manner as an accompanying survey in a wide variety of research projects. In addition, a platform was to be created to network and promote research into the social aspects of dealing with a pandemic. To this end, 37 research institutes from 24 university hospitals initially joined forces to link the research expertise at the university hospitals on the following topics: 1) socio-demographics, 2) occupational factors, 3) environmental factors and 4) care-related factors. Furthermore, direct lessons were drawn from current developments through medical-historical and medical-ethical analyses, and exchanges with external public health research institutions were organised.