On 21 October 2025, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) published new funding guidelines to support data usage projects in the field of eHealth. The aim is to promote the use of existing, high-quality, multicentre health data sets – including those from the NAKO Health Study – for innovative research projects.
Funding is provided for interdisciplinary pilot projects that examine health-related issues using existing data, thereby strengthening the transfer of new findings into research and healthcare. Among other things, the projects should contribute to the further development of national health data infrastructures and improve the practical usability of this data.
- Universities and non-university research institutions are eligible to apply.
- Project outlines can be submitted until 27 February 2026.
- Interested researchers from the German National Cohort (NAKO) are invited to participate with project ideas and to prepare their applications early.
Further information on the policy and procedure: Richtlinie zur Förderung von Datennutzungsprojekten im Bereich eHealth – Gesundheitsforschung BMFTR
Website of the project sponsor DLR: www.gesundheitsforschung-bmftr.de.
Making better use of health data opportunities
The ongoing digitisation of medicine and the cross-sector use of health data offer enormous opportunities for improving healthcare. This can lead to more accurate diagnoses, optimised treatment processes and increased efficiency in the healthcare system. This requires research into health-related issues using already accessible, high-quality, multicentre data sets.
With the High-Tech Agenda Germany, the Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR) promotes the targeted linking and use of health data for the “development of new diagnostic methods, active substances and drugs, vaccines and therapies so that diseases can be prevented, detected, treated and cured in a more targeted and personalised manner” and with a view to connecting Germany to the European Health Data Space (EHDS). This is based in particular on the health research data infrastructures (GFDI) established and expanded in recent years with the support of the BMFTR, such as the Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) with the Research Data Portal for Health (FDPG), the University Medicine Network (NUM), the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI) and the German National Cohort (NAKO). These GFDI support the collection, consolidation, quality assurance and provision of health data from healthcare and research. In doing so, they ensure the standardisation, harmonisation and interoperability of data sets, thereby making high-quality, cross-location (multicentre) health data available for research purposes in a structured, secure and sustainable manner. The national coordination group for publicly funded GFDI supports exchange between and transparency about the existing GFDI.
In the coming years, it will be of central importance to:
- to further improve the usability of health data within the GFDI,
- ensure high data quality to enable valid and robust scientific analyses,
- provide secure processing environments (Secure Processing Environments/Trusted Research Environments)
- that allow for data protection-compliant, high-quality research with health data,
- and support the secure merging and linking of data from different sources.
Against this backdrop, the BMFTR is promoting data usage projects for research into health-related issues based on high-quality, multicentre data sets from existing national GFDI within the framework of these funding guidelines. These pilot projects are intended to advance future “transfer to clinical application and public health research, including in the areas of prediction, more precise diagnosis and treatment of diseases, patient stratification, and prediction of disease progression” and to exploit the potential of the established GFDI for clinical-epidemiological and biomedical research.