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The National COVID Cohort Collaborative , or N3C , is a secure data and computing environment designed to facilitate virtual access to clinical data provided by 72 clinical centers nationwide on more than 374,000 patients with COVID-19 . Launched by the National Institutes of Health , it ’ s the single largest integrated collection of COVID-19 patient data in the nation , and its mission is threefold : make it easier for researchers across the country to access the large data set ; expand the number of research studies using the data and analytical supports available to improve our understanding of COVID-19 ; and demonstrate that aggregating data across centers really does work .
The University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus is playing a key role in N3C in part by contributing data from both Children ’ s Hospital Colorado and neighboring UCHealth . Additionally , Children ’ s Colorado critical care physician and informaticist Tell Bennett , MD , MS , is co-leading the N3C ’ s Clinical Scenarios and Analytics team . His team ’ s work includes writing code so that future database users will be able to efficiently run algorithms across the database without having to access any patient records .
“ One of the reasons this resource is crucial is that each medical center may not have enough patients with different subtypes of the disease to conduct the necessary clinical science ,” says Dr . Bennett . “ By having a centralized , cloud-based data resource , researchers across the country can easily access the information they need in significant sample sizes .”
For example , in a retrospective cohort study of COVID-19 patients , N3C data and machine learning helped predict clinical severity and risk factors over time ( 1 ). “ The N3C supports robust evidencebased development of predictive and diagnostic tools and informs critical care and policy ,” Dr . Bennett says . Researchers interested in accessing N3C can learn more through covid . cd2h . org / n3c . •
1 . Bennett , Tellen D et al . The National COVID Cohort Collaborative : Clinical Characterization and Early Severity Prediction . medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences 2021.01.12.21249511 . 13 Jan . 2021 .
TELL BENNETT , MD , MS
Critical care physician , Pediatric Intensive Care Unit , Children ’ s Hospital Colorado
Director , Informatics Core , Colorado Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute ( CCTSI ), Anschutz Medical Campus
Associate professor , Pediatrics-Informatics and Data Science , University of Colorado School of Medicine
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