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Can Data Sharing Accelerate In The Fight Against COVID-19?

As we continue the fight against COVID-19 and reflect on the pandemic response, it’s in our nature to look for opportunities to work together and help others. Indeed, we’ve seen numerous acts of heroism alongside tragic stories of loss.

In the research community, we are inspired by efforts to find new therapies and new policies to reduce the spread of the disease. To help support these efforts,  The COVID-19 Research Database will make it easier to share and analyze COVID-19 data. The goal of the initiative is to improve research and help scientists find answers faster.

Finding COVID-19 answers in the data

Across the globe, researchers are working relentlessly to seek answers to some of the most compelling questions the pandemic poses, such as:

  • Which treatment pathways are most effective in treating the disease?
  • How can we stratify the population based on clinical risk for COVID-19 associated severe complications?
  • How can we identify candidates for vaccine and other pharmaceutical clinical trials?
  • What types of policy/program interventions can be made to ensure we are better prepared for future waves?

Traditionally, the data to answer these questions can pose a number of challenges for research organizations.  Many of these research initiatives are operating in siloed environments, struggling to get timely access to comprehensive, reliable COVID-19 related data needed for finding faster answers.  Additionally, most organizations face other difficulties such as funding to procure data, severely limited use of data, issues with de-identification and privacy, and a hard time accessing medical records, claims, and prescription data all in one place.

COVID-19 data challenges

While each research organization may have access to their own sources of data, the data they have is typically limited. Data challenges researchers encounter include:

  • Data covers only a small subset of the population.
  • Pre-COVID-19 clinical patient history is missing.
  • Only one type of data is available, such as administrative, claims or electronic health records, but not both or all three.
  • Information unrelated to COVID-19 is missing, such as data on other coronavirus or similar respiratory type illness.
  • Older data is not updated as new data becomes available.

In addition to these data-specific challenges, researchers also may not have access to more advanced data and analytic technologies to help process the data they do have. Many labs do not have the high-performance databases, data management, analytics and artificial intelligence technologies and cloud-based platforms that could help find answers more quickly.