N3C Enclave Supporting 100 COVID Research Projects
Last April, Healthcare Innovation wrote about the creation of a centralized, secure portal for hosting COVID-19 clinical data called the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). Less than a year later, nearly 70 institutions are participating, and the N3C has compiled data on 516,393 COVID-19-positive patients. More than 100 research projects are under way.
Run by the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), the N3C is accepting data via multiple data models and transforming them into a common analytic model. The cloud-based collaborative portal is enabling development of machine learning and other informatics tools that require a large row-level dataset, and is overseen by a data access committee. Having access to a centralized enclave of this magnitude allows research teams to study, probe and answer clinically important questions about COVID-19 that they could not have answered previously.
Many of the approved research projects are examining how social determinants of health shape COVID-19 vulnerability and outcomes. A study by the University of Tennessee Health Science Center seeks to identify how much social determinants explain the variation in COVID-19 incidence, assess the impact of COVID-19 policies on the relationship between SDoH and COVID-19, and understand how SDOH can affect county-level resilience to COVID-19. A greater understanding of the relationship between SDoH and COVID-19 can help policymakers target the most vulnerable populations and improve intervention implementation.
Other studies are looking at how COVID is affecting people with specific chronic conditions. A study led by Virginia Commonwealth University is looking at the impact of COVID-19 on individuals with suppressed or compromised immune systems. Researchers at the University of North Carolina are studying factors affecting risk of poor outcomes for COVID-19 for patients with diabetes.
In a video on the web page for N3C, Hongfang Liu, Ph.D., program director for informatics at Mayo Clinic, described the NC3 as a large COVID-19 cohort aggregating clinical data from healthcare organizations nationwide. “It helps dramatically from the science perspective to derive a better understanding of the clinical knowledge associated with COVID because of the wide coverage of the cohort, it also helps us understand the associated risk factors and the socio-economic status and health disparity-related questions about COVID 19,” she said. “And such findings can quickly translate to healthcare interventions and better treatments. For me, as a translational scientist, it is a great time for us. I feel it is a time for us to contribute and play a critical role in this effort. We will have new treatments to be discovered. We feel we will have a better understanding of the COVID-19 complications and learn how to treat those complications. So to be a translational scientist, especially one with a data science background, it feels great to be part of the team, to handle this crisis and to advance the science behind it.”
