Today on Keeping IT Brief, Dr. William Kassler of Palantir, discusses the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (known as N3C)—a unique national EHR data repository bringing together health care records across 70+ institutions to help researchers better understand COVID. Bringing together EHR data across institutions—especially at this scale—is challenging.
Institutions rely on different data models, have different data quality issues, and seek assurances around the privacy and security of their data. Linking relevant data beyond EHR records in a way that preserves patient privacy is an additional challenge. To overcome these challenges, N3C established a data infrastructure to manage the data itself, as well as the access to and use of the data.
N3C now supports approximately 300 projects, 3,500 researchers and 12M patients. With such breadth and depth of data, N3C can support future research projects on a number of rare and under-studied conditions.
About William Kassler, MD, MPH, FACP, Chief Medical Officer, Palantir
Dr. William Kassler is Palantir Technologies’ Chief Medical Officer. He oversees Palantir’s life sciences and public health teams across the company’s U.S. government and international business. Dr. Kassler previously worked at IBM Watson Health, where he served as deputy chief health officer and chief medical officer for government health and human services.
His public health sector career included time as state health officer for the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services and chief medical officer for the New England Region of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He began his career at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
About Palantir
Palantir Technologies Inc. is a software company that builds the world’s leading platforms for data-driven operations and decision-making. Founded in 2004, Palantir Technologies has 2,500 employees across the world. We partner with government agencies, commercial institutions, and non-profit organizations to transform how they achieve their missions. Our partners have included the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and others.
