The University of California plans to contribute COVID-19 data collected from its hospitals to a national repository at the National Institutes of Health, allowing researchers access to more information on the disease, UC Irvine officials announced this week.
With the help of a $500,000 grant from the NIH, UC Irvine will spearhead the data transfer. Information gathered on COVID-19 from all five UC hospitals will be incorporated into a database of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative, a program run by the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, or NCATS.
University officials said they hope the massive national database will help researchers investigate some still-unknowns about the disease, including what the risk factors are.
“People have asked all kinds of questions: Is there a relationship between these simple things like age and sex and other illnesses, and the kind of medications that people are taking,” said Dr. Dan Cooper, associate vice chancellor for clinical and translational science at UC Irvine. “All this can be discovered when you have a large enough database.”
Information from all the patients who tested positive for COVID-19 at UC hospitals will be shared, along with data from two negative cases for every one positive case, as controls, said Lisa Dahm, director of UC’s Health Data Warehouse.
A UC Health-wide COVID-19 database includes information from roughly 500,000 patients who were tested for the disease, she said.
The $500,000 grant will be split among the five UC health campuses – UC Irvine, UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco and UCLA – and used “in order for us to safely and efficiently transfer the data that we have in the UC system on our patients who we know have been infected with COVID,” Cooper said.
That process will include making sure that the data shared is “de-identified,” meaning distinguishing information about the patients associated with it is absent, he said. The university said information transferred from the UC systems will include “age, sex, weight, medications and conditions such as high blood pressure or diabetes.”
Researchers seeking access to the national database can apply, officials said. Those studying COVID-19 would be able to draw on “detailed case data, including demographics, symptoms, medications, lab test results and outcomes,” and would also see patient ZIP codes and the dates they were provided medical service, the university said.
Some of the grant money will also be used to train researchers on how to use the database, Cooper said.
The NIH announced the creation of the database in June, saying in a news release at the time that it “aims to transform clinical information into knowledge urgently needed to study COVID-19, including health risk factors that indicate better or worse outcomes of the disease, and identify potentially effective treatments.”
With more than 70 institutions contributing, the database currently includes information from more than 950,000 people who tested positive for COVID-19, producing more than 4 billion rows of data.
COVID-19 information would be incorporated over the next five years “to understand long-term health impact” of the disease, NCATS’ website says.
Cooper said the UC system felt “that the whole country would benefit from being able to learn from the patients who had been hospitalized at the University of California Health academic health centers.”
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