“The pandemic continues to generate vast volumes of digital health data that could improve medical professionals’ understanding of COVID-19—but those potentially helpful datasets are often too large to share, and data management networks are so dissimilar they can’t be combined in a simple manner.”
“Near the middle of 2020, the National Institutes of Health’s NCATS, or the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, moved to help alleviate that issue by developing a centralized resource that integrates coronavirus-related electronic health record data from separate organizations in disparate formats into one seamless structure that can also be used to advance research to combat the global health crisis.”
“Multiple technology-based elements have resulted from this work, which is known as the NIH’s National COVID Cohort Collaborative—or the N3C—effort.”
“’The N3C Data Enclave is the largest collection of patient electronic health records and associated clinical information available for COVID-19 research. Its data, which resides in a secure environment that has strict access requirements, provides nearly complete U.S. geographic coverage and demographics fully representative of the U.S. population,’ NCATS Acting Director Dr. Joni Rutter told Nextgov this week. ‘N3C is very unusual in that it is largely community- and volunteer-driven with over 2,800 registered users, 1,600 investigators, 89 institutions agreeing to share data, 225 institutions signed to use the data and 245 research projects.'”
“At its core, N3C can be thought of as an enterprise level virtual research organization that enables scientists nationwide to engage in collaborative analytics via a secure, cloud environment. Clinical, laboratory and diagnostic data is rapidly collected through electronic health records stemming from a growing number of institutions, which is in turn tapped by the involved research community to study important questions about COVID-19—like risk and protective factors in particular populations, medications that may mitigate or promote severe infection, and long-term effects of infection—even as the pandemic progresses.”
“This national data enclave built explicitly for researchers was an outcome of NCATS adopting a cloud-first strategy over a period of years prior to the pandemic. This paved the way for secure, scientific, collaborative environments, according to Rutter…” Read the full article here.
Source: How NIH’s Research-Driving, Centralized Hub for COVID-19 Patient Data is Evolving – By Brandi Vincent, September 10, 2021. Nextgov.
