Privacy-Protecting, Reliable Response Data Discovery Using COVID-19 Patient Observations

Jihoon Kim; Larissa Neumann; Paulina Paul; Michael Aratow; Douglas S Bell; Jason N Doctor; Ludwig C Hinske; Xiaoqian Jiang; Katherine K Kim; Michael E Matheny; Daniella Meeker; Mark J Pletcher; Lisa M Schilling; Spencer SooHoo; Hua Xu; Kai Zheng; Lucila Ohno-Machado

doi:10.1101/2020.09.21.20196220

Privacy-Protecting, Reliable Response Data Discovery Using COVID-19 Patient Observations

medRxiv [Preprint]. 2020 Sep 23:2020.09.21.20196220. doi: 10.1101/2020.09.21.20196220.

Authors

Jihoon Kim¹, Larissa Neumann^{1

2

3}, Paulina Paul¹, Michael Aratow⁴, Douglas S Bell⁵, Jason N Doctor⁶, Ludwig C Hinske^{2

3}, Xiaoqian Jiang⁷, Katherine K Kim^{8

9}, Michael E Matheny^{10

11}, Daniella Meeker^{6

12}, Mark J Pletcher¹³, Lisa M Schilling¹⁴, Spencer SooHoo¹⁵, Hua Xu⁷, Kai Zheng¹⁶, Lucila Ohno-Machado^{1

17}

Affiliations

¹ UC San Diego Health Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA.
² Institute for Medical Information Processing, Biometry, and Epidemiology (IBE), Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Bavaria 81377, Germany.
³ LMU Klinikum, Department of Anaesthesiology, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Munich, Bavaria 81377, Germany.
⁴ San Mateo Medical Center, San Mateo, CA 94403, USA.
⁵ Biomedical Informatics Program, UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) Los Angeles, CA 90024, USA.
⁶ USC Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics, Price School of Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90031, USA.
⁷ School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX 77030, USA.
⁸ Betty Irene Moore School of Nursing, University of California, Davis, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA.
⁹ School of Medicine, Department of Public Health Sciences, Health Informatics Division, University of California Davis, Sacramento, CA 95817, USA.
¹⁰ GRECC Tennessee Valley Healthcare System, Nashville, TN 37212, USA.
¹¹ Department of Biomedical Informatics, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Nashville, TN 37232, USA.
¹² Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
¹³ Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA 94143, USA.
¹⁴ Data Science and Patient Value Program, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO 80045, USA.
¹⁵ Division of Informatics, Department of Biomedical Sciences, Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA 90048, USA.
¹⁶ Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
¹⁷ Veteran Affairs San Diego Healthcare System, San Diego, CA 92161, USA.

Abstract

There is an urgent need to answer questions related to COVID-19's clinical course and associations with underlying conditions and health outcomes. Multi-center data are necessary to generate reliable answers, but centralizing data in a single repository is not always possible. Using a privacy-protecting strategy, we launched a public Questions & Answers web portal (https://covid19questions.org) with analyses of comorbidities, medications and laboratory tests using data from 202 hospitals (59,074 COVID-19 patients) in the USA and Germany. We find, for example, that 8.6% of hospitalizations in which the patient was not admitted to the ICU resulted in the patient returning to the hospital within seven days from discharge and that, when adjusted for age, mortality for hospitalized patients was not significantly different by gender or ethnicity.

Publication types

Preprint

Abstract

Publication types

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