at least 65 million people have long been afflicted with Covid, a mysterious set of symptoms that persist in some patients more than 12 weeks after initial infection. Researchers are still working to understand the disease, but progress so far has been slow.
Indra Joshi, director of health, research and artificial intelligence at Palantir, which specializes in big data analytics, said Covid isn’t just a medical problem, it’s also a data problem.
Before the pandemic hit, hospitals in the United States kept data internally, making it difficult for policymakers and researchers to identify patterns of disease occurring across the country. has worked with the National Institutes of Health, a US medical research agency, to create what Josi describes as one of the largest collections of Covid-19 health records in the world.
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative, also known as N3C, is essentially a huge collaborative database, allowing clinicians and researchers to study anonymized data of people suffering from Covid-19 or related conditions. “Currently, if you are diagnosed with Covid, your data goes into this enclave,” Joshi said, explaining that N3C currently contains 2.1 billion clinical observations. The Data Enclave also encourages clinicians to enter data in a standardized format, allowing their insights to be easily compared to data collected from other US hospitals.
By harmonizing all this data, the N3C serves as a collective pool of information that researchers can mine to try to find consensus about the long-running Covid ongoing mystery. What exactly are the symptoms? What treatments are people receiving? And how are they responding to those treatments? Already N3C data are helping to better define the symptoms that make up Covid long. Black and Hispanic Americans also appear to experience more long-term Covid-related symptoms and health problems than white patients, but are also less likely to be diagnosed. became.
“By collating that information and allowing many different researchers to work on it, more research can be done and more can be published,” says Joshi. says. “We have now learned a lot more about the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”
