MainzelHandler: A Library for a Simple Integration and Usage of the Mainzelliste

Preciado-Marquez D, Becker L, Storck M, Greulich L, Dugas M, Brix TJ.

Abstract

Pseudonymization plays a vital role in medical research. In Germany, the Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. (TMF) has developed guidelines on how to create pseudonyms and how to handle personally identifiable information (PII) during this process. An open-source implementation of a pseudonymization service following these guidelines and therefore recommended by the TMF is the so-called "Mainzelliste". This web application supports a REST-API for (de-) pseudonymization. For security reasons, a complex session and tokening mechanism for each (de-) pseudonymization is required and a careful interaction between front- and backend to ensure a correct handling of PII. The objective of this work is the development of a library to simplify the integration and usage of the Mainzelliste's API in a TMF conform way. The frontend library uses JavaScript while the backend component is based on Java with an optional Spring Boot extension. The library is available under MIT open-source license from https://github.com/DanielPreciado-Marquez/MainzelHandler.