Volume 57 | December 19, 2022
A program of NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences
Sites with Signed
DUAs
346
Orgs with EHR Data Released into the Enclave
232
COVID-19
Positive
Patients
6,536,324
Rows
of Patient
Data
20.7 billion
Approved
N3C Research
Projects
412
Have a Wonderful Holiday Season!

As we have come close to the end of 2022, we would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone for their continued support and contributions to N3C. As a community, we had a very productive year on numerous publications and becoming a finalist for the HeroX Dataworks Challenge. We have had a tremendous year of achievements within the N3C community. We appreciate and are proud of everyone’s dedication, hard work, innovative ideas, and accomplishments. We look forward to 2023 and are excited to launch the N3C Clinical Tenant Pilot, learn more from you, continue the N3C work, and continue our impactful work together for more patients and more disease areas. We wish you and your loved ones a happy holiday.  

-N3C Leadership-
(We need your help! For your vote to count, you must register or log in to your HeroX account.)
Voting closes on Wednesday, December 21 at 9:59pm ET.
The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is championing a bold vision of data sharing and reuse. The HeroX DataWorks annual challenge showcases the benefits of research data management while recognizing and rewarding teams whose research demonstrates the power of data sharing or reuse practices to advance scientific discovery and human health. FASEB and NIH seeks new and innovative approaches to data sharing and reuse in the fields of biological and biomedical research.

CMS Training
There are several training options to learn how to use the Centers of Medicare and Medicaid Services data in your N3C analysis. CMS and N3C data experts are available to answer your questions during recorded webinars and N3C office hours. 

The addition of CMS Medicare data is an exponential leap in the scientific potential of N3C. The collaboration not only strengthens the overall capacity of the Enclave, but also resolves the issue of missing visits for patients that get their care from multiple providers.  

The initial CMS data contains over 240K COVID-19 patients and will be updated on a monthly basis. The number of CMS patients represented is dependent on sites participating in the NCATS PPRL linkage initiative, and as additional sites implement the tokenization process the number of patients will increase.  
 
Investigators registered with N3C and whose institutions have signed the NCATS Data Use Agreement will be eligible to submit a Data Use Request project proposal in the Enclave to access the CMS data. Please see Enclave holiday hours below. 

This data is available a generous grant from Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) OS-Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund (OS-PCORTF)
N3C In Depth CMS Training - Recorded Webinar
Watch here


For Questions about CMS Data
N3C Office Hours - Thursdays

Investigators can also attend office hours with a CMS data subject matter expert on Thursdays at 10am PT/ 1pm ET, registration information can be found at https://covid.cd2h.org/support. Information on accessing these and other PPRL datasets can be found in the N3C PPRL training module (enclave access required)
Enclave Support for the December and January Holidays

Enclave support team will provide reduced coverage from December 19, 2022 through January 2, 2023 (Winter break). 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 in early January. Have a wonderful holiday!


Monday, December 19th to January 2nd:
Support team will provide critical support only.  
Critical issues and platform outage support only (one person from the Enclave team will be on call).
  • If users experience outages that are preventing them from completing their work, they can file an issue within the Enclave and set the priority to Critical. There will be a person on call for platform outages and critical issues.

The final data release of the year was on Friday, January 16, 2022
Data releases are planned to resume on Thursday, January 5, 2023
N3C In the News

Medscape: T2D Diagnoses Spike Coincident With COVID Onset (December 12, 2022)
Researchers published the study covered in this summary on medRxiv as a preprint that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

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
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 January 1st and January 16th due to federal holidays.

December 19, 2022
Topic: Exporting Code from the Enclave to Github
Presenter: Shawn O'Neil, PhD
University of Colorado

January 9, 2022
Topic: Metformin is Associated with Less Severe COVID-19: N3C Analyses and How They Informed a Phase 3 Trial
Presenters: Justin Reese, PhD, and Carolyn Bramante, MD
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and University of Minnesota

January 23, 2022
Topic: C4R Project - Collaborative Cohort of Cohorts for Covid-19 Research
Presenters: Elizabeth Oelsner, MD
Columbia University
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 have recently crossed the 2-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).