NEW YORK – Laboratory Corporation of America and Ciox Health said today that they are collaborating to develop a registry for COVID-19 patient data.
The registry will contain curated, HIPAA-compliant de-identified patient data that the companies said can be used to "better understand and characterize COVID-19 diagnoses and treatments and generate insights that will aid ongoing and future pandemic preparedness and prevention efforts."
The registry will contain COVID-19 testing data generated by LabCorp, which has performed roughly 500,000 SARS-CoV-2 tests to date, along with longitudinal medical record data put together using Ciox's DataFit Platform, which converts unstructured medical data from various sources into structured data sets suitable for clinical analysis.
Over the next few months, analysis of the data is expected to provide information about, among other things, host and environmental factors, and other risk factors, that contribute to susceptibility to, or protection from, SARS-CoV-2 infection.
Once the registry is launched, the parties hope to add data from other private and public healthcare providers.
"A comprehensive dataset will yield valuable insights and we are ready to support researchers and public health organizations to advance our collective understanding of this pandemic," Pete McCabe, CEO of Ciox, said in a statement. "We see this as only the beginning and are hopeful that, together, we and LabCorp will galvanize a public/private data sharing partnership to deepen our understanding of COVID-19 and other infectious diseases so we can plan for and manage these pandemics more effectively now and in the future."
"Healthcare practitioners and researchers need dynamic and real-time insights about COVID-19 to address this health care crisis and develop better treatment options for patients," said Lance Berberian, chief information and technology officer at LabCorp. "Combining life sciences and data sciences, including artificial intelligence and natural language processing, is the next frontier in the battle against the virus."