Johns Hopkins University, Stony Brook University and Oregon Health & Science University are among a group of 15 institutions participating in the National Institutes of Health's $25 million collaborative to integrate data from hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 patient medical records with disease research.
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative is supported as part of a $25 million NIH award to the National Center for Data to Health. Institutions that joined the collaborative, which is based at Oregon Health & Science University's clinical and translational research center, provide medical records from patients who have undergone COVID-19 testing or are suspected to be infected.
Researchers granted access to the collaborative's EHR database can run algorithms and build predictive analytics tools using the data to support COVID-19 research initiatives such as predicting patient responses to antiviral or anti-inflammatory therapies and identifying potential new drugs and treatments. The National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences is providing the database, and individuals who use it will not be able to see actual patient records to preserve patient identities.
"The coronavirus pandemic has spurred us to build, for the first time, a process for collecting and harmonizing electronic health records from many different institutions, storing it in one secure location, and making it available in a collaborative platform for use by diverse experts," said Melissa Haendel, PhD, the collaborative's lead investigator and director of the National Center for Data to Health.
The first sample of EHR data was transferred to the database May 12.
Here are the 15 institutions that have agreed to provide data for the collaborative:
- Oregon Health & Science University (Portland)
- Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Rockefeller University (New York City)
- Washington University (St. Louis)
- University of Kentucky (Lexington)
- Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston)
- Stony Brook (N.Y.) University
- University of Alabama at Birmingham
- Tufts University (Medford, Mass.)
- University of Wisconsin-Madison
- University of Massachusetts (Amherst)
- Wake Forest University Health Sciences (Winston Salem, N.C.)
- Maine Medical Center Research Institute (Scarborough)
- Penn State (Hershey, Pa.)