Personal health data are mainly collected and analyzed by physicians, epidemiologists, public health researchers, and biometricians. Researchers in epidemiology, medical biometry, medical informatics, public health, health services research, social medicine, and nutritional epidemiology, as well as researchers in clinical trials, thus form a large part of our user community. Many of them have a dual role as data holders and data users. Typically, data collections are stored in decentralized, autonomous data infrastructures that are intended to remain decentralized but need to be integrated into a common framework for centralized search and access.

In order to identify, concretize and address the specific needs of health research, NFDI4Health involves key stakeholders in this field as participants. To promote the acceptance and use of our developed concepts, NFDI4Health already involved the user community during the application phase and asked for the requirements and needs of the user community in a survey and discussed the objective of the application in a community workshop. NFDI4Health continues this engagement and actively involves the user community in the following areas of the project: Governance, project calls, training and dissemination activities for different target groups, and feedback loops. In terms of content, this is ensured in particular by Task Areas TA4 and TA5.