The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment.

Objective: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successfu...

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Published in:Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association Vol. 28; no. 3; pp. 427 - 444
Main Authors: Haendel, Melissa A, Chute, Christopher G, Bennett, Tellen D, Eichmann, David A, Guinney, Justin, Kibbe, Warren A, Payne, Philip R O, Pfaff, Emily R, Robinson, Peter N, Saltz, Joel H, Spratt, Heidi, Suver, Christine, Wilbanks, John, Wilcox, Adam B, Williams, Andrew E, Wu, Chunlei, Blacketer, Clair, Bradford, Robert L, Cimino, James J, Clark, Marshall
Format: Journal Article
Published: Oxford University Press / USA Mar2021
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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      dt: Mar2021
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      pub: Oxford University Press / USA
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        atl: The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment.
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          Haendel, Melissa A
          Chute, Christopher G
          Bennett, Tellen D
          Eichmann, David A
          Guinney, Justin
          Kibbe, Warren A
          Payne, Philip R O
          Pfaff, Emily R
          Robinson, Peter N
          Saltz, Joel H
          Spratt, Heidi
          Suver, Christine
          Wilbanks, John
          Wilcox, Adam B
          Williams, Andrew E
          Wu, Chunlei
          Blacketer, Clair
          Bradford, Robert L
          Cimino, James J
          Clark, Marshall
        affil: Oregon Clinical and Translational Research Institute, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland , Oregon, USA
      sug:
      ab: Objective: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successful with large-scale data beyond what is available in any given organization. Here, we introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), an open science community focused on analyzing patient-level data from many centers.Materials and Methods: The Clinical and Translational Science Award Program and scientific community created N3C to overcome technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers to sharing and harmonizing individual-level clinical data. We developed solutions to extract, aggregate, and harmonize data across organizations and data models, and created a secure data enclave to enable efficient, transparent, and reproducible collaborative analytics.Results: Organized in inclusive workstreams, we created legal agreements and governance for organizations and researchers; data extraction scripts to identify and ingest positive, negative, and possible COVID-19 cases; a data quality assurance and harmonization pipeline to create a single harmonized dataset; population of the secure data enclave with data, machine learning, and statistical analytics tools; dissemination mechanisms; and a synthetic data pilot to democratize data access.Conclusions: The N3C has demonstrated that a multisite collaborative learning health network can overcome barriers to rapidly build a scalable infrastructure incorporating multiorganizational clinical data for COVID-19 analytics. We expect this effort to save lives by enabling rapid collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and data scientists to identify treatments and specialized care and thereby reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19.
      pubtype: Academic Journal
      doctype: Journal Article
      ougenre: Article
    language: English
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