Volume 58 | January 31, 2023
A program of NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
Sites with Signed
DUAs
354
Orgs with EHR Data Released into the Enclave
72
COVID-19
Positive
Patients
6,995,310
Rows
of Patient
Data
22.1 billion
Approved
N3C Research
Projects
430
Applications Now Open for 3 New PHASTR Questions!

Proposals are now being accepted for 3 new National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) PHASTR - N3C Public Health Answers to Speed Tractable Results questions. See the N3C website for submission details and timelines N3C PHASTR | N3C (cd2h.org).
 
The N3C PHASTR initiative is a new opportunity to use N3C data to provide fast actionable analyses on high-impact COVID-19 public health questions. It’s also an opportunity to increase community engagement on using big data for research and machine learning best practices. 

Individuals or teams can apply for N3C PHASTR subcontracts to address specific public health questions. There will be multiple public health questions subcontractor opportunities throughout the rest of the year. The initial N3C PHASTR questions currently open for proposals are:
  1. Does the use of UDCA (ursodeoxycholic acid) at baseline reduce the incidence and/or severity of COVID-19?  
  2. Use of the N3C enclave and machine learning to create generalizable algorithms that predict patient outcomes at (a) diagnosis, and (b) time of hospitalization.
  3. Is Long COVID associated with an increased risk of mortality?

These applications close on February 15, 2023.
What the Research Community is Saying about N3C
Lorna Thorpe, PhD
Professor and Director, Division of Epidemiology
Vice Chair, Strategy and Planning
Department of Population Health
NYU Grossman School of Medicine
"I have had the privilege of working with N3C colleagues for the past year, as they characterize long COVID for the NIH-funded REsearching COVID to Enhance Recovery (RECOVER) initiative. Together with two other large electronic health record networks, N3C investigators have applied their cutting-edge informatics, epidemiology and clinical expertise to lead many long COVID investigations, including rapidly characterizing subtypes of long COVID, examining risk factors for developing long COVID, and assessing the impacts of acute COVID treatment and severity on the likelihood of PASC development. By involving patients with long COVID on their analysis teams, N3C researchers have successfully aligned their work with the experiences of actual patients. The team has advanced the field with their scholarship on this important topic and are a great pleasure to work with. I look forward to learning from their insights in the upcoming year!"
Important Publication Reminder!
REMINDER: All N3C publications and presentations must be submitted to the Publication Committee for review.

N3C researchers are reminded that in accordance with N3C Attribution & Publication Principles and N3C User Code of Conduct, all enclave data ⁠— whether as tables, figures, or text ⁠— must comply with an approved DUR and must receive download approval from the download committee. Compliance and approval are requirements before data leave the N3C enclave environment. Likewise all potential publications ⁠— whether full-length manuscripts, conference abstracts, posters, or presentations ⁠— (whether or not they include patient data) must be submitted to the Publication Committee for approval and tracking in advance of submission for peer review and/or preprint. Submission to the publication committee happens via the form at https://bit.ly/n3c-publication-intent. Currently, published works can be browsed at https://bit.ly/n3c-google-scholar; please report any gaps or errors to n3c.pubs@gmail.com. 

Learn more about the process at https://covid.cd2h.org/publication-review
Google Drive access for N3C Researchers

If you are an N3C researcher who needs to access documents in the NCATS-owned Google Drive*, please onboard and / or update your preferred Google account here

*Note that NCATS has a business agreement with Google and documents in this drive are not mined by Google
Enclave Support for President's Day

Monday, February 20, 2023
Support team will provide critical support only!

The Enclave support team will provide reduced coverage for critical issues and platform outage support only (one person from the Enclave team will be on call). If you experience platform issues or outages that are preventing you from completing your work, please file an Issue within the Enclave and set the priority to Critical. A member of our on-call support will get back to you. For all other non-urgent issues, we will respond when we return.
N3C In the News

Over the past three years, it has become clear that, for many people, the effects of SARS-CoV-2 infection persist long after an initial case of COVID-19 wanes.
- Yahoo!; January 27, 2023

Researchers have uncovered distinct long-COVID subtypes they believe may help stratify patients and inform treatment strategies.
- LabPulse.com; January 27, 2023


Nemours Children's Hospital pediatric cardiologists explain lessons learned about cardiac involvement and long-term issues from multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), a rare but serious disease caused by exposure to the COVID-19 virus. 
- Cardiovascular Business; Dave Fornell; January 26, 2023

In women who have contracted COVID-19, the presence of polycystic ovary syndrome(PCOS) does not appear to drive the risk of increased disease severity, according to a study.
- MIMS: January 25, 2023

At the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (NHLBI), CIO Alastair Thomson says machine learning (ML) played a major role in COVID-related research. The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (NC3) clearly demonstrates the value of securely bringing together data in one place, where it can be analyzed by thousands of researchers. Through collaboration with various healthcare and cloud service providers, the NC3 and ML helped NIH identify potential participants for the RECOVER initiative.
- GovCIO; Katherine McPhail; January 24, 2023

Datavant, the leader in enabling organizations to securely connect health data, has achieved a major information security designation, Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP®) Authorization to Operate (ATO) at the Moderate Impact level.
- GlobalNewsWire; January 18, 2023

In a recent study posted to the medRxiv* preprint server, a team of researchers from the United States used electronic health records to characterize the incidence, biomarkers, attributes, and severity of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reinfections and evaluated the association between reinfections and long coronavirus disease (COVID).
- News Medical Life Sciences; Dr. Chinta Sidharthan; January 10, 2023

Long COVID has emerged as a pandemic within the pandemic. As scientists work to untangle the many remaining unanswered questions about how the initial infection impacts the body, they must now also investigate why some people develop debilitating, chronic symptoms that last months to years longer.
- News from Berkeley Lab; Aliyah Kovner; January 5, 2023

Undergoing hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HSCT) within 4 weeks of SARS-CoV-2 infection is associated with an increased risk of death at 90 days after HSCT, according to real-world data presented at the 2022 ASH Annual Meeting.
- Cancer Therapy Advisor; Leah Lawrence; January 4, 2023
New N3Community Forum Schedule & Update

Community Forum will have a new schedule starting March 13th. The Forum will take place every 2nd and 4th Monday of the month and include Real World Data research.

We will also be transiting the Zoom account and will send out an announcement with the new registration link next month.
Events

N3Community Forum

Presentations take place on select Mondays from 5–6 p.m. ET/2–3 p.m. PT. To attend these and future N3Community Forum presentations, please register here.

Missed an N3Community Forum or want to revisit a past Forum? You can find all the videos on our YouTube page.

The Community Forum will not take place during the
week of February 20th due to a federal holiday.

February 6, 2022
Topic: Publication Committee Updates
Presenters: Publication Committee - Swaroop Vedula, MD, Carolyn Bramante, MD, Christine Suver, PhD, and Julie McMurry, MS, MPH
Johns Hopkins University, Sage Bionetworks, and University of Colorado 

February 13, 2022
Topic: N3C PPRL Updates
Presenters: Jasmin Phua and Shaun Grannis, MD
Datavant and Regenstrief Institute

February 27, 2022
Topic: Increased Stroke Severity and Mortality in Patients with SARS-CoV-2 Infection: An Analysis from the N3C Database
Presenters: Andrew Sutherland, MD, Johanna Loomba, MS, Indika Mallawaarachchi, MS, and Sarah Ratcliffe, PhD
University of Virginia

March 6, 2022
Topic: Real World Data: Deidentification Methods, Considerations for Ethical AI and Data Distribution
Presenter: Brad Malin, PhD
Vanderbilt University
If You are Interested in N3C Research Results and Conversations 
Attend the Community Forum!

Please register for your Community Forum meeting link. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email from cd2h@uw.edu containing information about joining the meeting and you will also have the ability to download the .ics file to create calendar reminders for future Community Forums.
Register for the Community Forum at https://covid.cd2h.org/forum
Help Us Give You Attribution for Your N3C Publications!

When you have a research product that is ready for publication or accepted for presentation, please submit it via the N3C Publication Intent Form, which will notify the Publication Committee of N3C output to be registered. (Research products include: manuscripts, posters, conference papers, blogs, press releases, podium presentations, etc.)

Per the N3C Attribution and Publication Principles, all manuscripts using N3C community resources must be reviewed by the Publication Committee. Non-manuscript products do not require review but should be submitted after they have been accepted by the conference to allow for promotion and tracking of collaborator accomplishments.

View the Publication Review web page for more details.
N3C Domain Teams

N3C Domain Teams enable researchers with shared interests to analyze data within the N3C Data Enclave and collaborate more efficiently in a team science environment. They include multidisciplinary Clinical Domains composed of subject matter experts, statisticians, informaticists, and machine learning specialists who focus on clinical questions surrounding COVID-19's impact on health. Cross-Cutting Domains have a varied focus that applies to multiple domains. These teams provide an opportunity to collect pilot data for grant submissions, train algorithms on larger datasets, inform clinical trial design, learn how to use tools for large-scale COVID-19 data, and validate results. N3C encourages researchers of all levels to join a Domain Team that represents their interests, or to suggest new clinical areas to explore.


Offboarding

As we approach the 3-year mark for the COVID-19 pandemic, it is a good inflection point to identify colleagues who have completed their efforts with CD2H/N3C projects and have transitioned to other great opportunities. If this is you, or perhaps your colleague, we would like to ask that you complete this 2-minute form (Bit.ly/cd2h-offboarding-form) to offboard CD2H and or N3C projects. You can continue to just get the newsletter if you wish.

We thank you for your tireless efforts in CD2H/N3C projects and look forward to working with you on many other projects.
Reporting Concerns

In the event that you come across activities that pose misalignment with the principles outlined in the Community Guiding Principles for the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), you can privately notify us using the Report Conduct Concerns form located on the N3C website under the SUPPORT menu. Your feedback is important and we will take prompt and confidential action to address your concerns. All data management incidents should also be reported to NCATS. Thank you for your contribution!
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) is a complementary and synergistic partnership among the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs, the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), distributed clinical data networks (PCORnet, OHDSI, ACT, TriNetX), and other partner organizations, with overall stewardship by NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). The N3C aims to improve the efficiency and accessibility of analyses using a very large row-level (patient-level) COVID-19 clinical dataset, demonstrate a novel approach for collaborative pandemic data sharing, and speed understanding of and treatments for COVID-19.
CD2H is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) 
at the National Institutes of Health
(Grant U24TR002306).