Motivating Developers to Use Interoperable Standards for Data in Pandemic Health Apps Michael Rusongoza MUZOORA a,b,1 , Nabil EL-BADAWI a,b , Christian ELSNER e , Andrea ESSENWANGER a , Peter GOCKE b , Dagmar KREFTING c , Rasim Atakan POYRAZ a,b , Rüdiger PRYSS f , Ulrich SAX d and Sylvia THUN a,b,c a Berlin Institute of Health at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany b Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany c Hochschule Niederrhein – University of Applied Sciences, Krefeld, Germany d Universitätsmedizin Göttingen, Germany e Universitätsmedizin Mainz, Germany f Universitätsklinikum Würzburg, Germany Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought along a massive increase in app development. However, most of these apps are not using interoperable data. The COMPASS project of the German COVID-19 Research Network of University Medicine (“Netzwerk Universitätsmedizin (NUM)”) tackles this issue, by offering open-source technology, best practice catalogues, and suggestions for designing interoperable pandemic health applications (https://www.netzwerk- universitaetsmedizin.de/projekte/compass). Therefore, COMPASS conceived a framework that includes automated conformity checks as well as reference implementations for more efficient and pandemic-tailored app developments. It further aims to motivate and support developers to use interoperable standards. Keywords. Pandemic app, COVID-19, interoperability, healthcare data 1. Introduction During the COVID-19 pandemic, the smartphone became the central way of sharing health related data [1]. A variety of pandemic apps were developed, but for researchers, to use the gathered data efficiently, the data needs to be interoperable and standardized [2]. One of the COMPASS project’s main purposes is to establish a coordination and technology platform to ensure the use of standardized data and compliance with law and data protection regulations in the development of pandemic apps. This paper highlights the project’s potential to motivate developers to use interoperable standards, such as FHIR, SNOMED CT, LOINC, for data in pandemic apps. 1 Michael Rusongoza Muzoora, Berlin Institute of Health, Anna-Louisa-Karsch-Straße 2, 10178 Berlin, Germany; E-mail: michael.muzoora@charite.de. Public Health and Informatics J. Mantas et al. (Eds.) © 2021 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI210339 1027