Healthcare Consortium Formed

HCA Healthcare https://hcahealthcare.com recently formed a Consortium of public and private research institutions to use HCA Healthcare’s vast data on COVID-19 hospital care to help improve patient outcomes and provide knowledge to the public.

The COVID-19 Consortium of HCA Healthcare and the Academia for Research GEneration (CHARGE) provides a framework for cooperation and coordination among all members to test research questions, scrutinize and validate methods, and most importantly, share and act on innovative ideas that will help lead to results.

The group will use a technology platform provided by DataFleets, to allow multiple collaborators to explore trends in a protected environment that obscures individually identifying information.

Members of COVID-19 CHARGE include:

  • HCA Healthcare/HCA Healthcare Research Institute/Sarah Canon Research Institute
  • Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ)
  • Johns Hopkins University
  • Duke University
  • Meharry Medical College
  • Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
  • Columbia University
  • HOSpital MEdicine Reegingeering Network (HOMERuN) which includes UCSF, Baystate Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital

 

As a learning health system, HCA Healthcare collects and analyzes data from approximately 35 million annual patient encounters to develop technologies and best practices to improve patient care.

HCA Healthcare’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute https://sarahcannon.com is one of the world’s leading clinical research organizations conducting community-based clinical trials throughout the U.S, and the United kingdom.

The data captured at the beginning of the pandemic now has captured data from more suspected and positive COVID-19 cases than any other health system in the U.S and the United Kingdom including more than 110,000 patients who were admitted for inpatient care in 2020.

The Consortium will start with retrospective studies in the short term, such as evaluating the efficacy and safety of treatments used for COVID-19 which will be used to improve the understanding of the root cause for clinical outcomes and develop novel predictive models. The insights gained from the research may lead to future clinical trials.