COVID-19 clinical data available for research through new N3C analytics platform

OHSU researchers studying COVID-19 are encouraged to access data from the records of more than 50,000 coronavirus-positive patients that are part of the new National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) data platform.

The N3C Data Enclave was officially launched in September with support from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences. The enclave currently holds data related to about 18.3 million visits, 21 million observations, 45.5 million procedures and 288 million lab results, all of which come from the health records of 490,000 patients, 50,000 of whom were confirmed to have COVID-19. More than 60 organizations have agreed to contribute health records for the effort.

For more information on N3C, see the NIH’s Sept. 2 announcement and OHSU’s May 26 announcement.

To request access to the platform’s data: Click the purple “Access the Enclave” button on the N3C website and follow instructions for first-time users. Please use your OHSU email address when registering, as OHSU has an institutional data use agreement with the collaborative. After you register for an account, access is granted within 48 business hours.

Three levels of data are available: 1) synthetic data or a safe data derivative, 2) de-identified data, 3) limited data. If you request limited data, you will need IRB approval from your home institution and must provide documentation of human subject research protection training. If you have questions, follow the drop-down menu to the Support Desk page.

Users are encouraged to join one or more clinical domain teams, multidisciplinary research teams focusing on specific aspects of COVID-19 ranging from diabetes to pediatrics. These teams collaboratively submit data access requests to avoid duplication of efforts and to ensure appropriate expertise while answering questions about the pandemic. See the list of clinical domain teams at the bottom of this Collaborative Analytics page.

Some additional benefits of the N3C Data Enclave include:

• Generating sample data for pilot projects and grant proposals
• Training algorithms on a very large cohort of patients
• Opportunities to train junior researchers (the domain teams can offer support and a network for these investigators)
• Informatics and statistics opportunities for innovation and evaluation
• Opportunities for clinicians to investigate COVID-19 treatment patterns and disease progression

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative is coordinated by the National Center for Data to Health, which is based at OHSU’s Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute.