January 27, 2021 – HCA Healthcare (Nashville, TN) formed a consortium of prominent public and private research institutions to use HCA Healthcare’s 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 Health Care Institute, and others – will gain access to the data in a research program directed by the HCA Healthcare Research Institute (HRI).
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, according to the company.
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 share and act on ideas that will help lead to impactful results, the company says.
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 Health Care 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.