HCA Healthcare uses its COVID-19 registry to form a COVID-19 research consortium
HCA Healthcare announced it has formed a consortium of prominent public and private research institutions to use HCA Healthcare’s vast data on COVID-19 hospital care to improve patient outcomes and public knowledge.
The institutions – including the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Meharry Medical College, Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute, and others – will gain access to the data in a research program directed by the HCA Healthcare Research Institute (HRI).
As a learning health system, HCA Healthcare collects and analyzes data from its approximately 35 million annual patient encounters to develop technologies and best practices to improve patient care. With support from HCA Healthcare’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute and its precision medicine platform, Genospace, HCA Healthcare created a COVID-19 patient registry at the outset of the pandemic that has since captured data from treating more suspected and positive COVID-19 cases than any other health system in the United States, including more than 110,000 patients who were admitted for inpatient care in 2020.
“Scale accelerates learning. As HCA Healthcare’s learning network has treated more COVID-19 inpatients than any other health system in the U.S., this innovative public, private and academic sector partnership accelerates the understanding of COVID-19 and its treatment in a manner that would be difficult to replicate elsewhere and serves as a model for addressing the nation’s most pressing healthcare questions,” said Dr. Jonathan Perlin, president, clinical operations group, and chief medical officer of HCA Healthcare.
The COVID-19 Consortium of HCA Healthcare and Academia for Research GEneration (CHARGE) provides a framework for cooperation and coordination among all members to pose and test research questions, scrutinize and validate methods, and, most importantly, share and act on ambitious and innovative ideas that will help lead to impactful results. The group will use a technology platform, provided by DataFleets, that allows multiple collaborators to explore trends in a protected environment that obscures individually identifying information.
Members of COVID-19 CHARGE include:
· HCA Healthcare / HCA Healthcare Research Institute / Sarah Cannon Research Institute
· Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
· Columbia University
· Duke University
· Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute
· HOspital MEdicine Reengineering Network (HOMERuN), which includes University of California San Francisco, Baystate Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital
· Johns Hopkins University
· Meharry Medical College
The consortium will start with retrospective studies in the short term, such as evaluating the efficacy and safety of treatments used for COVID-19, improving overall understanding of the root cause for clinical outcomes, and developing novel predictive models. The insights gained from this research may lead to future clinical trials.
“Access to HCA Healthcare’s vast data repository will greatly accelerate the pace of discovery of new knowledge related to systems and approaches to care for patients with COVID-19. To put it succinctly, this initiative will help save lives,” said Shoshana J. Herzig, MD, MPH, Director of Hospital Medicine Research, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
