The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)
Addressing the COVID-19 pandemic as quickly and efficiently as possible demands an unprecedented amount of coordination between a worldwide network of clinicians, researchers, data scientists, software developers, and more. In particular, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive, harmonized, secure clinical data portal. This need is being addressed by the new National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C, https://covid.cd2h.org/N3C). N3C provides a home for aggregating and analyzing data pertaining to Covid-19. In addition to collecting data, N3C will develop machine learning and other informatics tools to help address some of the key challenges in Covid-19 research. There is no historical precedence for anything like N3C in the US, involving partly identifiable Electronic Health Record (EHR) patient data, harmonized from many institutions.
The figure below shows a schematic of the overall project workflow. Importantly, since the shared data could be partly identifiable, the data is stored in a secure platform, with strictly regulated usage. Researchers who meet the requirements (https://ncats.nih.gov/n3c/about/applying-for-access) can apply for access to the data, for use only for COVID research and response planning.
A partnership between multiple federally-funded agencies including the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS, http://ncats.nih.gov) and the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H, https://ctsa.ncats.nih.gov/cd2h/), along with distributed clinical data networks PCORnet, OHDSI, ACT/i2b2, and TriNetX. N3C is led by Monarch co-PI Melissa Haendel of Oregon State University, Ken Gersing of NCATS, and Christopher Chute of Johns Hopkins University.
More information:
- N3C website: https://covid.cd2h.org/N3C
- Twitter accounts to follow: @data2health, @ncats_nih_gov
- How to apply for access to N3C data: https://ncats.nih.gov/n3c/about/applying-for-access
