LEXINGTON, Ky. — The University of Kentucky is joining the national fight against coronavirus.

What You Need To Know


  • UK joins National COVID Cohort Collaborative

  • Collaborative will analyze COVID-19 patients' medical records

  • Will use data to develop treatments, find more information on virus

The university is now part of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), a partnership of clinical institutions affiliated with the National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) to use data against COVID-19. NC3 includes clinicians, informaticians and biomedical researchers who are turning data from COVID-19 patients' medical records into treatments and predictive analytical tools.

Over 30 institutions have joined so far and more are expected join. 

“This national, collaborative analytics project is critical in helping us learn more about the novel virus,” said Jeff Talbert, Ph.D., director of the UK Institute for Biomedical Informatics. “There is still a lot we don’t know about it, but we do know that it hits some people hard while others not at all, and infection rates vary across communities. Big data can help us understand why.”

Part of what the N3C will be doing is pooling data from health systems around the country for analysis. The database will use new machine learning and modern statistical analyses to do things like predicting patient responses to therapies, identifying new treatments and finding indicators. 

NC3's data will be available to researchers with institutional affiliations and the public through a cloud-based system. Those with access will be able to run algorithms on the data set without seeing the actual patient records. 

Information for the database is needed from a diverse group of people. Institutions interested in contributing or participating should send an email to data2health@gmail.com