SACS representing Meharry on HCA consortium

SACS is representing Meharry on the COVID-19 Consortium of HCA Healthcare and Academia for Research Generation (CHARGE). The School joins faculty from Columbia, Duke, Johns Hopkins, the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute and other institutions to research HCA’s extensive COVID-19 patient data sets to pursue improvements in COVID-19 diagnosis and treatment options. 

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The HCA Today blog says that, as a learning health system, HCA Healthcare collects and analyzes data from its approximately 35 million annual patient encounters to develop technologies and best practices to improve patient care. With support from HCA Healthcare’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute and its precision medicine platform, Genospace, HCA Healthcare created a COVID-19 patient registry at the outset of the pandemic that has since captured data from treating more suspected and positive COVID-19 cases than any other health system in the United States, including more than 110,000 patients who were admitted for inpatient care in 2020.

The COVID-19 Consortium of HCA Healthcare and Academia for Research GEneration (CHARGE) provides a framework for cooperation and coordination among all members to pose and test research questions, scrutinize and validate methods, and, most importantly, share and act on ambitious and innovative ideas that will help lead to impactful results. The group will use a technology platform, provided by DataFleets, that allows multiple collaborators to explore trends in a protected environment that obscures individually-identifying information.

Meharry joins an impressive group of colleagues from:

• HCA Healthcare / HCA Healthcare Research Institute / Sarah Cannon Research Institute
• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ)
• Columbia University
• Duke University
• Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute
• HOspital MEdicine Reengineering Network (HOMERuN), which includes University of California San Francisco, Baystate Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital
• Johns Hopkins University

HCA Today adds that the consortium will start with retrospective studies in the short term, such as evaluating the efficacy and safety of treatments used for COVID-19, improving overall understanding of the root cause for clinical outcomes, and developing novel predictive models. The insights gained from this research may lead to future clinical trials.

This consortium is one of several collaborations with health care organizations and peer universities. Learn more about the impact we are making through data science on our external collaborations page.