Patient Database Offered for Covid-19 Research Group

(Elchinator, Pixabay)

26 Jan. 2021. A large health care system is offering data from its Covid-19 patient registry to a consortium of government and academic research labs. HCA Healthcare in Nashville, Tennessee is forming the Covid-19 Consortium of HCA Healthcare and Academia for Research Generation, or Charge, and making available data from its medical record database for research to improve Covid-19 patient outcomes.

HCA Healthcare says it collects data from some 35 million annual patient encounters for analysis and recommendations on best practices for patient care. The health care system of 187 hospitals and clinics in 21 states and the U.K. says it began a patient registry collecting data on Covid-19 care at the outset of the pandemic from people confirmed or suspected of infection.

HCA Healthcare says the database now has data on 110,000 patients admitted to its hospitals in 2020 for Covid-19 treatment. The registry uses the services of the Sarah Cannon Research Institute, a cancer research center affiliated with HCA Healthcare, and its precision medicine platform called Genospace that analyzes granular genomic data for cancer treatments and clinical trials.

Taking part in Charge, along with HCA Healthcare, are researchers from Columbia University, Duke University, Johns Hopkins University, Meharry Medical College, and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, as well as the Hospital Medicine Reengineering Network, or Homerun, which includes University of California in San Francisco, Baystate Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Begin with retrospective studies

Also participating in Charge is Agency for Health Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. AHRQ produces evidence to help make health care in the U.S. safer and higher in quality, as well as more equitable, accessible, and affordable.

Jonathan Perlin, HCA’s chief medical officer and president of clinical services, says in a company statement, that the “public, private, and academic sector partnership accelerates the understanding of Covid-19 and its treatment in a manner that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere and serves as a model for addressing the nation’s most pressing healthcare questions.”

The Charge consortium expects to begin with retrospective studies that evaluate safety and efficacy of Covid-19 treatments. The findings are expected to help better understand underlying issues related to Covid-19, to improve patient outcomes, and build new predictive models.

David Meyers, acting director of AHRQ, notes the Charge “has both the potential to rapidly produce new evidence to improve the safety and quality of care for people with Covid-19 and serve as a model for the development of a national learning health system.”

Shoshana Herzig, director of hospital medicine research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, one of the participating institutions, adds, “Access to HCA Healthcare’s vast data repository will greatly accelerate the pace of discovery of new knowledge related to systems and approaches to care for patients with Covid-19.”

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• $500K Challenge Seeks A.I. Covid-19 Reopening Models
• FDA Issues Guidance to Boost Clinical Trial Diversity
• Int’l Lab Network to Assess Covid-19 Vaccines

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