NY Health Consortium Receives $8M to Expand Patient Data Network

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has awarded nearly $8 million to expand the INSIGHT Clinical Research Network, a Weill Cornell-led database containing EHR and clinical trial data from 15 million patients at five of New York City’s most prominent academic medical centers.

The collaboration has enabled increased citywide data sharing, which is designed to foster research that provides insights into healthcare quality and cost, provision of health services, and relationships between health outcomes and social determinants of health (SDOH), such as employment, housing, and access to health services.

"INSIGHT is propelling data science forward and allowing us to harness an extensive amount of clinical information from all aspects of the patient experience to improve healthcare," said Rainu Kaushal, MD, principal investigator of INSIGHT and senior associate dean of clinical research and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences at Weill Cornell Medical College, in the press release. "This renewed funding will enable us to maximize our capabilities to carry out groundbreaking research, and continue to maintain and expand this high-quality, comprehensive resource for researchers nationwide."

The $8 million renewal will support studies using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze health data, which have the potential to aid in health decision-making. It will also support clinical trials and research studies on health interventions already being used in a real-world setting, in addition to studies on the long-term effects of COVID-19.

“Healthcare is very fragmented, especially in New York City,” said Andrea Cohen, INSIGHT’s project director and executive director of strategy and business for clinical research at Weill Cornell Medicine, in the press release. “In order to understand the impact of healthcare on patients and accelerate the pace of quality research, we need to bring together data from many sources and make it widely accessible.”

INSIGHT was established in 2013 with a $7 million grant, and this is the second time funding has been renewed since. The consortium is led by Weill Cornell Medicine, and includes Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Montefiore Health System, Mount Sinai Health System, NYU Langone Health and NewYork-Presbyterian.

The cloud-based INSIGHT database has generated over $100 million in research funding for the network’s member institutions and is accessible to researchers around the country, according to the press release. Along with the database, the consortium collaborators also established a governance body made up of clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders, designed to generate ideas for recruitment, research questions, and how studies are designed and communicated to communities.

Currently, INSIGHT is using a $9.8 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to co-lead the “RECOVER PCORnet Adult Initiative to Use Real World and Electronic Health Record (EHR) Data to Study Post-Acute SARS CoV-2 Syndrome (PASC),” a nationwide collaboration of over 40 healthcare organizations analyzing EHR data to detect, predict, treat, and prevent long COVID. PASC seeks to leverage patient data to address fundamental scientific questions, such as long COVID’s disease manifestations over time and the susceptibility of certain populations to adverse outcomes.