The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has granted the Columbia-based University of South Carolina $1.25 million to develop a state-wide data-driven system to fight COVID-19 in South Carolina.
The university’s Big Data Health Science Center (BDHSC) has been awarded the funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, a center within NIH. University researchers contend that the speed of COVID-19 transmission across the U.S., and its morbidity, are particularly alarming. “As clinicians and frontline health workers battle to save lives, it has become critically important to create a data environment that accelerates research as a response for precision health,” they stated.
This two-year grant will support the team’s efforts to develop a database system via REDCap and a mobile application for collating surveillance, clinical, multi-omics and geospatial data on both COVID-19 patients and health workers treating COVID-19 patients in South Carolina.
This data system, university officials say, will allow the investigators to examine the natural history of COVID-19, including transmission dynamics, disease progression, and geospatial visualization, and to identify important predictors of short- and long-term clinical outcomes of COVID-19 patients in South Carolina using machine learning algorithms.
These aims will be accomplished through a close partnership with the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (DHEC) and other state agencies and stakeholders relevant to COVID-19. This project will also lead to the creation of a REDCap database and mobile app that collects relevant coalescing data in a timely fashion that leverages with statewide integrated data warehouse capabilities, according to officials.
Recent data from the DHEC shows that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the state is nearing 27,000, with 673 confirmed deaths. The number of individuals testing positive has been rising; state data shows that on June 22, 5,122 people were tested (not including antibody tests) and the percent positive was 17.4 percent.
“Today, the U.S. health system has an opportunity to leverage and deploy real-time multitudinal and multimodal data currently being collected for precision health,” said Bankole Olatosi, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Department of Health Services Policy and Management within the Arnold School of Public Health “The combination of such data with other data sources, such as social media data and geospatial data, holds great promise for accelerating research in understanding the natural history of the COVID-19 disease now and in the future.”
As evidenced by poor national health rankings, challenging rural geography and health professional shortages, South Carolina’s residents are already vulnerable to poor health. These additional challenges suggest that the impact of COVID-19 likely will be long lasting in the state, according to university officials.
“This project is significant as it will build on a strong partnership between UofSC and DHEC and take advantage of COVID-19 surveillance, clinical, multi-omics and geospatial data to help us to understand and monitor transmission dynamics, natural history, virology and clinical outcomes,” stated
Xiaoming Li, Ph.D., professor of the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior within the Arnold School of Public Health. “As a result of improved computational architecture and improved capabilities in data management and analytics software, we can now quickly build integrated multitudinal and multimodal datasets to support data annotation, reproducible analytics, and controlled-access archiving and sharing.”
