Data4Life supports the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin in developing a corona app "CovApp"

Technology helps speed up decision-making for anyone worried about a coronavirus infection.

Berlin, March 18, 2020. The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 continues to spread in Berlin. Uncertainty among the population is increasing, leading more and more people to seek out doctors and hospitals for testing. The university hospital in Berlin, together with the nonprofit organization Data4Life in Potsdam, has made a meaningful contribution to organizing medical care in Berlin by developing the CovApp.

With the CovApp, everyone can fill out a questionnaire from home to decide if they should go to a Charité examination center for people suspected of having coronavirus or if another contact center is appropriate. The questionnaire is anonymous and is edited and saved directly on the user’s end device. For those who fill out the CovApp questionnaire and visit a Charité examination center, the CovApp supports their doctors during consultation and helps shorten the waiting period for all arrivals. Additionally, all answers from the questionnaire can be transferred efficiently to the hospital using a QR code. Implementing a QR code for sharing relevant medical information increases efficiency on site, making it possible for more people to get tested daily and receive care in the outpatient clinic.

“We have set out to support the healthcare system with technological solutions and offer people solutions to improve their health and quality of life in the long term,” explains Christian Weiß, CEO of Data4Life, showing the organization’s commitment. “As a nonprofit organization, we have a privilege and duty in times like these to help all relevant actors with our resources and know-how,” Weiß continues.

“By implementing the CovApp, we’re contributing to the protection of our patients and employees. Due to high demand in our examination center, it’s of the utmost importance that we do not endanger people whose symptoms do not indicate SARS-CoV-2, and inversely, that we can swab patients who do need testing as quickly as possible,” explains Prof. Dr. Ulrich Frei, Chief Medical Officer at the Charité.

The Charité and Data4Life are receiving legal counsel on this project from Dr. Ulrich Grau and Lisa Zerbe at D+B Rechtsanwälte. Dr. Ulrich Grau, partner at the law firm D+B Rechtsanwälte, adds: “The quickly developed app is not designed to provide a diagnosis. In this crisis situation, however, the app can contribute to optimizing procedures in medical care for the population.”

Data4Life is a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving healthcare and research with technology and data. Data4Life supports actors in the health system, like the Charité, with technological know-how and resources, using technological solutions to make healthcare more efficient. In cooperation with strong partners such as the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH and financed by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, Data4Life has been successfully working on fast and stable technological solutions for the health sector since 2018. These solutions are currently being applied in this collaboration with the Charité.

Access to the CovApp: covapp.charite.de

About Data4Life
D4L data4life gGmbH (www.data4life.care) is a nonprofit organization with over 100 employees at 5 locations, originating as a research project at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute for Digital Engineering gGmbH (under the name Gesundheitscloud) and funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Data4Life wants to make a meaningful contribution to improving healthcare by developing and operating IT infrastructures and digital services for the management and analysis of health data and by applying algorithms to the research of diseases and evaluation of treatment methods. In March 2020, Data4Life developed the CovApp (covapp.charite.de) for and in close cooperation with the Berlin Charité to help people deal with COVID-19. Data4Life was certified in July 2019 by the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) as ISO 27001 compliant on the basis of “IT-Grundschutz.” D4L data4life gGmbH was founded at

the end of 2017 with headquarters in Potsdam, Germany. The managing director is Christian-Cornelius Weiß.

Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin
The Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, with around 100 clinics and institutes on 4 campuses, is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe. In 2018, 152,693 inpatient cases and 692,920 outpatient cases were treated. Research, teaching, and healthcare are closely linked at the Charité. Group-wide there are around 18,000 employees at the university hospital in Berlin, making the Charité one of the largest employers in Berlin. More than 4,500 employees are active in the care sector and 4,300 in the scientific and medical sector. In 2018, the Charité reached a total income of more than 1.8 billion euros. With more than 170.9 million euros in third-party funding, the Charité reached another record. More than 7,500 students are studying medicine and dentistry in the medical department, which is one of the largest in Germany. In addition, there are 619 training positions in 9 healthcare professions.
charite.de

About D+B Rechtsanwälte
D+B Rechtsanwälte has been located in Berlin, Düsseldorf, and Brussels since 1997, working exclusively in health law as one of the leading firms in this field.