Building a Research Infrastructure with REDCap and FHIR

At the university hospital of Giessen since 2018 a research infrastructure has been implemented as part of the German Medical Informatics Initiative. A central FHIR repository acts as the core part of this architecture where clinical data from various subsystems is consolidated. In the past, research projects were connected via FHIR or research databases like i2b2 or OMOP to this core dataset. REDCap was added as an electronic data capture platform especially for local research projects that need to combine data entry together with the available dataset on the central FHIR repository. Meanwhile this infrastructure has been successfully used within 3 research projects in internal medicine and psychosomatic medicine.