“The National Institutes of Health on Monday unveiled a centralized platform that approved users can tap into to contribute, access and analyze data derived from COVID-19 patients’ electronic health records, as part of a dedicated effort to more quickly convert clinical information into insights that can accelerate research against the novel coronavirus.”
“Funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS, NIH recently developed the National COVID Cohort Collaborative—or the N3C—effort. According to a news release regarding the work, N3C will systematically capture clinical, diagnostic and laboratory data from participating health care providers nationwide, aggregate that data into a more standardized, easily-accessible format, and swiftly enable users to leverage new, collaborative research insights from that harmonized information via the NCATS N3C Data Enclave.”
“’NCATS initially supported the development of this innovative collaborative technology platform to speed the process of understanding the course of diseases, and identifying interventions to effectively treat them,’ NCATS Director Christopher Austin said in a statement. ‘This platform was deployed to stand up this important COVID-19 effort in a matter of weeks, and we anticipate that it will serve as the foundation for addressing future public health emergencies.’ The COVID-19 pandemic continues to generate massive heaps of clinical data that could improve medical experts’ understanding of, and abilities to effectively treat, the novel coronavirus. However, as NIH notes, those potentially helpful datasets ‘often become too large to share, and the networks for data management are so dissimilar that they cannot be combined easily.’ Through the initiative, the agency hopes to help alleviate that issue by creating and refining a safe and centralized resource that integrates COVID-19-related EHR data from separate organizations in disparate formats into a common, seamless structure that can also be used to advance research to stop the pandemic and enhance treatments and intervention…” Read the full article here.
Source: NIH Unveils Centralized Resource for COVID-19 Patient Data – By Brandi Vincent, June 16, 2020. Nextgov.
