The Health Study Hub is a platform that serves two distinct types of users. On the one hand, it enables researchers and data holders to publish their project characteristics, documents, and data related to their research projects in a FAIR manner. On the other hand, data from researchers can be discovered and reused.

The aim of the Health Study Hub is to make research data from clinical, public health and epidemiological studies as accessible as possible to people and machines. This does not mean, however, that the data are publicly accessible and can be reused without restriction. Rather, the aim is to open up research results and data for new usage scenarios within the legal and technical limits. 

Data holders (data producers) can publish their information according to the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) via a graphical web-based user interface or an interoperable application programming interface (API).

As sharing data is often seen as a burden or an afterthought, the process of doing so must be as simple and straightforward as possible. Consequently, information should be collected once and not multiple times. APIs are therefore available to transfer information from existing (internal) systems, and software consultants can assist in developing the necessary transformation processes. Where information cannot be re-used, a graphical data capture form is available and trained data stewards are available to assist with data capture.
In addition, the platform aggregates and harmonizes information already entered in various public repositories such as DRKS, clinicaltrials.gov, WHO ICTRP to provide a holistic view of the German research landscape in the aforementioned research areas. In addition, data stewards actively collect available information from (public) resources such as websites that cannot be automatically integrated.
The inventory of descriptive information and preservation data, either transferred/input by data producers, collected by other repositories or actively collected by data stewards, is an asset used by the platform to enable data consumers (scientists or researchers) to find relevant information about past and ongoing studies and to provide information about access rights. Depending on the data available, semantic search and exploration down to variable and item level is possible. In addition, the system links research artefacts and provides summary statistics on the available data.