NIH Funds National Project to Promote COVID-19 Data Sharing

UC hospitals have received a $500,000 grant from NIH to enable COVID-19 data sharing on a national scale, allowing collaborations among researchers, providers, and patients.

Led by the University of California, Irvine (UCI), leaders will manage a transfer of UC data on COVID-19 cases into the National COVID Cohort Collaborative’s (N3C) centralized data resource at the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

“We were very involved in the pandemic from day one,” said Dan M. Cooper, associate vice chancellor for clinical and translational science at UCI.

In June 2020, N3C launched an analytics platform for EHRs so that researchers could more easily investigate COVID-19. To date, its Data Enclave has collected records from over one million patients.

Researchers pursuing COVID-19-related studies can apply for quick access to detailed case data, including demographics, symptoms, medications, lab test results, and outcomes. While most personal information is not included, patient ZIP codes and dates of service are. Data will continue to feed into the secure system for five years to help address both immediate and long-term questions about the disease.

N3C is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of NIH.

“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,” Christopher P. Austin, MD, NCATS Director, said at the time N3C launched.

“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.”

UC Health centers have also collected a large amount of data from patients with COVID-19. The $500,000 grant will allow the UCI team to incorporate this information into the N3C Data Enclave, making case records available on a national scale. The institutions will securely contribute patient information like age, sex, weight, medications, and conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes, with identifying details removed.

“Rather than going to each of our campuses, we fashioned an agreement where we would share our database,” said Cooper, who is also chair of UC Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development, a coalition of all five UC health centers – those at UCI, UC San Francisco, UC San Diego, UC Davis and UCLA – with NIH funding for translational research.

“The huge value of this large database is identifying the risk factors. There may be medications that are being given out that actually improve the condition.”

Collaborators within the UC Biomedical Research Acceleration, Integration, and Development coalition include leaders from UC San Diego, UC Davis, UC San Francisco, and UCLA.

This partnership is part of an effort within UCI to organize health-related data and make it available to researchers across campus. UCI’s Collaboratory of Data in Health and Wellness created a patient database that’s easily accessible to researchers and allows for collaboration among scholars, medical providers, and patients to enhance healthcare.

“UCI researchers combined the data from the N3C Data Enclave with data in the collaboratory,” said Tom Andriola, vice chancellor for information, technology and data. “This is providing UCI investigators and their collaborators an environment designed for rapid, data-driven discovery.”

Data sharing and partnerships have been a critical focus of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2020, HCA Healthcare and Google Cloud established an open data platform designed to promote data sharing during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Called the COVID-19 National Response Portal, the platform aims to help hospitals and communities understand how the virus is spreading, as well as how to prepare and respond.

“As healthcare providers, we are all battling the same crisis,” said Michael Wargo, vice president of emergency preparedness at HCA Healthcare.

“However, we are being faced with COVID-19 at different times and levels of severity. By pooling our data into one cohesive platform, we can share best practices to better prepare communities across the country for this unprecedented pandemic.”