Data Share

From the LA Daily News: 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...

Full story at https://www.dailynews.com/2021/03/26/uc-system-to-contribute-its-covid-19-hospital-data-to-national-research-effort/