The Stony Brook Medicine COVID-19 Data Commons was developed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and has led to key research initiatives, evidence-based clinical management and community engagement. One recently published example includes the characterization of the Stony Brook cohort, which used the demographics, clinical characteristics and hospital course of patients with COVID-19 at Stony Brook University Hospital to identify predictors of poor outcomes that can be used for resource allocation in future waves of the pandemic. (https://academic.oup.com/ofid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ofid/ofaa436/5905333) In addition, mapping the geospatial analysis of the geographic residence of the hospitalized patients at Stony Brook University Hospital demonstrated that hospitalization was disproportionately associated with areas of higher population density.
Collectively, the work from the Stony Brook Medicine COVID-19 Data Commons has also served as a launching point for Stony Brook and its investigators to become leaders in the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) national efforts. The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) has now been established as part of the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) with the NIH. Dr. Saltz now co-leads the data analytics effort for N3C, and the backbone of data processing within N3C is being built by Stony Brook researchers, with experience from our efforts at Stony Brook University. Thus, we are creating what will soon become a platform for cohort analysis of multi-center collaborative initiative from across the U.S.