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PCORnet CDC COVID-19 Data Initiative

Published on April 26, 2022

PCORnet CDC COVID-19 HEALTHCARE DATA INITIATIVE – The COVID-19 Electronic Healthcare Data Initiative is a CDC-funded surveillance partnership project using data from electronic health records (EHRs). The University of Iowa is a participating site.

According to Betsy Chrischilles, Iowa site PI, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet) was launched in 2013 and is comprised of 60 network partners embedded within 8 clinical research networks, including data from everyday encounters with more than 66 million people across the US. “The hard work to stand up a common data model that standardizes data from all sites into a single language allowed us to pivot quickly to COVID-19 surveillance, enabling fast insights about disease severity, treatment disparities, vaccine safety, and prevalence of PASC.” 

Most recently, the UI team helped secure funding for a multimillion-dollar PCORnet study of post-acute sequelae of SARS-Cov-2 (PASC) infection, often referred to as “long-haul COVID.” The PCORnet-RECOVER EHR cohort study is led by Weill Cornell Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The University of Iowa team is a collaboration between the UI Department of Epidemiology and the Institute for Clinical and Translational Sciences Biomedical Informatics Core.