26 January 2021 - - US-based healthcare provider HCA Healthcare (NYSE: HCA) has formed a consortium of prominent public and private research institutions to use HCA Healthcare's vast data on COVID-19 hospital care to improve patient outcomes and public knowledge, the company said.

The institutions including the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality, Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Meharry Medical College, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and others will gain access to the data in a research program directed by the HCA Healthcare Research Institute.

As a learning health system, HCA Healthcare collects and analyzes data from its approximately 35m 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.

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.

The HCA Healthcare Research Institute leverages the capabilities and expertise of HCA Healthcare's Sarah Cannon Research Institute to expand research support beyond its core expertise in oncology.

Sarah Cannon Research Institute is a clinical research organization, conducting community-based clinical trials throughout the United States and United Kingdom.

HCA Healthcare and HRI believe that collaboration with institutions focused on research related to the SARS-CoV-2 virus and COVID-19 global pandemic leverages the collective expertise of the members involved, advancing institutional and national research, scientific, and clinical missions for the benefit of humanity.

Nashville-based HCA Healthcare is one of the nation's providers of healthcare services comprising more than 2,000 sites of care, including 187 hospitals, surgery centers, freestanding ERs, urgent care centers, and physician clinics, in 21 states and the United Kingdom.