NIH Launches COVID-19 Data Analytics Platform

June 17, 2020

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has launched a centralized, secure platform to store and study vast amounts of medical record data from people diagnosed with coronavirus disease across the country. It is part of an effort, called the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), to help scientists analyze these data to understand the disease and develop treatments. This effort aims to transform clinical information into knowledge urgently needed to study COVID-19, including health risk factors that indicate better or worse outcomes of the disease, and identify potentially effective treatments.

Having access to a centralized platform will help researchers and healthcare providers answer clinically important questions they previously could not, such as, “Can we predict who might need dialysis because of kidney failure?” or “Who might need to be on a ventilator because of lung failure?” and “Are there different patient responses to coronavirus infection that require distinct therapies?” A demonstration of the platform can be viewed at ncats.nih.gov/n3c.