- NIH Awards SBIR Grant for Algorithm to Fight Hospital Infections
NIH stated that the platform will help researchers and healthcare providers answer clinically important questions about which patients may need dialysis because of kidney failure or individuals who may need to be on a ventilator because of lung failure.
Data access will be open to all approved users, but the N3C data will be used only for COVID-19 research purposes, including clinical and translational research and public health surveillance.
“NCATS initially supported the development of this innovative collaborative technology platform to speed the process of understanding the course of diseases, and identifying interventions to effectively treat them,” Christopher P. Austin, MD, NCATS Director, said in the announcement.
“This platform was deployed to stand up this important COVID-19 effort in a matter of weeks, and we anticipate that it will serve as the foundation for addressing future public health emergencies.”
N3C is funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of NIH.
Other N3C support comes from the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
NCATS is taking security and privacy measures to keep users protected through its cloud-based database, certified through the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, which provides standardized assessment, authorization, and monitoring for cloud products.
This ensures the data is valid while also protecting patient privacy, NIH said.
“The exciting transformation this platform represents is in providing an environment where data and the power of the analytics can be used by researchers and clinicians to quickly examine and answer new COVID-19 hypotheses,” said Warren A. Kibbe, PhD, chief of translational biomedical informatics in the department of biostatistics and bioinformatics and chief data officer for the Duke Cancer Institute.
NCATS will leverage its database to oversee the use of N3C through user registration, federated login, data user agreements with institutions, and data use requests with users.
Currently, there are 35 collaborating sites across the US. N3C will translate the different ways that contributing hospitals and organizations store patient data into one common format, which NIH called an ‘apples to apples’ analysis.
“Contributing sites add demographics, symptoms, medications, lab test results, and outcomes data regularly over a five-year period, enabling both the immediate and long-term study of the impact of COVID-19 on health outcomes,” the agency stated.
Using a machine learning approach and statistical analyses, the platform will identify connections and patterns more quickly than can be done through traditional methodologies.
The advanced analytics allow researchers to explore numerous questions and acquire answers on a larger scale.
“By leveraging our collective data resources, unparalleled analytics expertise, and medical insights from expert clinicians, we can catalyze discoveries that address this pandemic that none of us could enable alone,” said Melissa Haendel, PhD, director of CD2H at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine and director of translational data science at Oregon State University.
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