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A Penn State Nittany Lion statue is seen in the courtyard of Penn State College of Medicine in Summer 2016. The statue is in focus toward the right side of the image. Out of focus in the background, green plants and trees are visible in the courtyard.

National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)

Through the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), researchers studying COVID-19 are able to access an innovative analytics platform that contains clinical data from the electronic health records of people who were tested for the novel coronavirus or who have had related symptoms.

Part of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) National COVID Cohort Collaborative Data Enclave, the centralized and secure data platform features powerful analytics capabilities for online discovery, visualization and collaboration.

The data are robust in scale and scope and are transformed into a harmonized data set to help scientists study COVID 19, including potential risk factors, protective factors and long-term health consequences.

Data analysis within the enclave is supported by both R and Python, the most widely used open-source platforms for statistical analysis and data science. Researchers requesting access to, or working within, the enclave are encouraged to assemble collaborative teams with diverse expertise in such areas as clinical research, statistical analysis and informatics to make the best use of the N3C Data Enclave.

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Working with N3C

Data Access Expand answer

Users must have an ORCiD to access N3C.

Request access via covid.cd2h.org

Note: Penn State Clinical and Translational Science Institute helped secure a data use agreement for the University, and that step of enrollment can be skipped. For step-by-step directions, email the institute at ctsi@pennstatehealth.psu.edu.

Goals Expand answer

The goals of the N3C are:

  • to create a robust data pipeline to harmonize electronic health records data into a common data model;
  • to make it fast and easy for the clinical and research community to access a wealth of COVID-19 clinical data and use it to research COVID-19 and identify effective interventions as the pandemic continues to evolve;
  • to establish a resource for the next 5 years to understand long-term health impact of COVID-19; and
  • to create a state-of-the-art analytics platform to enable novel analyses that will serve to address COVID-19 as well as to demonstrate that this collaborative analytics approach could be invaluable for addressing other diseases in the future.
About the N3C Expand answer

The N3C is a partnership among the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)-supported Clinical and Translational Science Awards Program hubs and the National Center for Data to Health, with overall stewardship by NCATS.

Collaborators contribute and use COVID-19 clinical data to answer critical research questions to address the pandemic.