NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) https://ncats.nih.gov is creating data platforms needed to guide the response to COVID-19. During public health emergencies like COVID-19, it is important to utilize science and then turn this knowledge into new therapies.
This creates problems as the datasets are often too large to share and the networks for data management are so dissimilar that they cannot be combined easily, which creates roadblocks in efforts to develop new treatments.
Since there is no standardized way to collect and harmonize all the data being generated, there is a need for a COVID-19 analytics platform capable of turning all of the data into new knowledge that can speed research efforts.
An effort called the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) https:////ncats.nih.gov/n3c receiving $25 million in support from NIH, aims to build a centralized national data resource that the research community can use to study COVID-19 and identify potential treatments as the pandemic continues to evolve.
N3C will systematically collect data derived from the EHRs from people tested for the coronavirus or have had related symptoms. The first sampling of EHRs were transferred to researchers May 2020.
N3C will also rapidly collect and analyze of clinical laboratory and diagnostic data from hospitals and healthcare plans. If successful, this approach and the information obtained will be applicable to other research questions and may serve as a model for addressing future public health emergences.
The data will be made available via a centralized secure analytics platform from NCATS which is a cloud-based research environment. NCATS is taking multiple precautions for security and privacy to keep the data safe within the protected cloud infrastructure.