“The N3C provides an incredible platform to collaborate with scientists from around the country to generate important real-world evidence regarding medications given to patients with COVID-19. As the safety and effectiveness of existing drugs and new treatments are being evaluated, it is vital that we use the best available data sources and science to do so. The N3C provides an unparalleled resource—and framework—to conduct rigorous studies to address questions around medication use in COVID-19.”

“As someone with an immunocompromised family member, this pandemic brought fear and uncertainty into my home. There is little data on how immunocompromised patients will respond to SARS-Cov-2 infection, which has resulted in patients wondering if they should suspend life-altering treatments. The N3C initiative and data repository has sparked national collaborations with the goal of answering many of these yet unanswered questions about COVID-19. The ISC Domain Team aims to mine the N3C data to identify how different types, levels, and durations of immunocompromise may affect severity and outcomes of infected patients.”

“The N3C is a valuable resource for advancing our understanding of the impact of COVID-19 on the kidney, which will have a direct impact on how we deliver health care to these patients.”

“The N3C data and community are an incredible asset for rapidly engaging in timely research about COVID-19. The Pregnancy Domain Team aims to leverage N3C data to gain insights into pressing COVID-19 questions around pregnancy. Our goal is to understand incidence, timing and severity in pregnant women, maternal and infant outcomes, and associated characteristics (clinical, demographic, environmental). We invite others to join our team to help expand our goals and research questions to best address questions with clinical relevance in this vulnerable population.”

“During the public health crisis brought on by COVID-19, the CTSA, and CD2H networks have uniquely been able to translate data into medical knowledge that can help bring this pandemic to an end. The N3C initiative exemplifies the shared commitment of the community to make data more open and accessible to scientists everywhere. We are excited to announce the launch of N3C, not just for the research outcomes it will provide, but also for the new way data can be accessed and tools and analytic workflows can be shared among researchers.”

"The N3C initiative is rapidly creating an unprecedented, multi-institutional clinical data source, along with powerful analytic pipelines to gain actionable insight into the COVID-19 pandemic. The curated dataset includes different time periods, geographic locations, and hospital types that will lead us to a much deeper and more rich understanding of the facets of the pandemic. Going forward, this remarkable partnership will be the benchmark against which all observational clinical research efforts will be judged."

"COVID-19 is a public health crisis that impacts everyone. The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) initiative unifies the informatics community for the common goal of transforming big data into knowledge. It will enable us to generate insights from nationwide observational data, advance our understanding of the virus, and derive real-world evidence for rapid dissemination. I am grateful to be part of this effort."

"Translating research results into clinical actionable insight is very challenging; creating pipelines/tools from bench to bedside and back in a scalable and systematic way is critical. COVID-19 is teaching us that there's huge value in collaboration across sites to examine larger datasets and to ask and answer questions that each individual institution does not have enough data on their own to address. Healthcare is moving away from building more infrastructure to thinking more pragmatically about how to use the data and tools and technologies we already have in more impactful ways. Forming collaborative networks is a central feature of that."

“I am the co-lead for the N3C Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) task team who is working diligently to identify resources and clinical questions around SDoH related to vulnerability and resilience to COVID-19 outcomes. This N3C effort will allow my team to analyze data at the appropriate scale for this research type. The N3C group is very welcoming. I am not a faculty member of a CTSA, but I have been allowed to be very involved with the Clinical Scenarios and Portals & Dashboards workgroups. I am thoroughly impressed by how the CD2H is handling this ambitious effort.”

“I feel so fortunate to be a part of the CTSA and N3C communities that demonstrate the best of humanity and the power of team science with hundreds of scientists, clinicians, and informaticians volunteering their time and expertise to address the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“The Translational Research Institute at UAMS is very excited to be part of the N3C initiative. This data-sharing resource provides the opportunity to better understand the national impact of COVID-19 on the health of vulnerable populations. We are particularly interested in using this platform to compile a novel resource for radiology images of COVID-19 patients. This initiative, led by Fred Prior, will support both research and the education of trainees. Under John Arthur’s leadership, we will also use N3C to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on renal function and identify risk factors that will allow us to personalize future COVID-19 treatments. We envision a number of other research endeavors with colleagues in the College of Public Health using clinical data from all 60 CTSA institutions to develop effective treatment and prevention strategies for the future.”

“Only with the support of our CTSA consortium and N3C partners and collaborators can we achieve our goal of having a centralized national data repository and analytics platform with the power of Big Data to help assess, predict, and identify the most successful approaches that could have direct impact on curbing this yet-to-be cracked pandemic.”

“The coronavirus pandemic has spurred us to build, for the first time, a process for collecting and harmonizing electronic health records from many different institutions, storing it in one secure location, and making it available in a collaborative platform for use by diverse experts. No one’s ever created a dataset like this in the history of the United States.”

“As the co-lead of the Portals and Dashboards subgroup with Dave Eichmann at University of Iowa, my experience engaging with N3C has been very smooth, in spite of the urgency and very short timelines. Self-directed tutorials are now available through Palantir, the NCATS hosted platform for the N3C Enclave. For anyone who has not yet joined a workstream or a subgroup, I definitely encourage you to do so! There is a lot to do and a large capacity for contributing to our institutional data and knowledge for solving important national and global COVID-19 problems.”

“I have been excited about N3C since I first heard of the concept. I was delighted to have UNC support N3C with effort from our Informatics group led by Emily Pfaff. I have helped engage others in the process of getting the wider community of investigators on board. Now I am beavering away trying to leverage N3C to understand the problem of severe outcomes from COVID-19 in patients with diabetes. It has been inspiring to play a small role with a cast of hundreds in this groundbreaking innovation to address the biggest threat the world has faced in my lifetime.”

“I am really excited about N3C, not only because it will provide wide and wise access to data that enables many professional and citizen scientists to find important relationships among COVID19 infection, clinical features, other medical conditions, and social-environmental circumstances—but also because I hope it will serve as a model for the provision of data concerning so many other national health crises as wide-ranging as asthma to sickle cell disease. N3C shows that as a nation we can decide to share data for our common good.  Let’s build on its success to speed health improvement and disease prevention for all Americans.”

"The N3C establishes the precedent for EHR data integration on a secure enclave to support clinical discovery enabled by collaborative, large-scale, computationally-intensive data science. We believe that there’s an enormous amount of talent, not just in academic medical centers, but in computer science departments, data science departments, social studies departments. We may transform the way clinical science is done, leveraging the tools and resources of big data and data science in ways that have not been possible.”