An international cohort of OHDSI collaborators obtained a grant from the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to lead an effort to compare the effectiveness of treatments, including corticosteroids such as dexamethasone, under current evaluation for COVID-19 across an international observational data network. The Therapeutics Accelerator is an initiative launched by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Wellcome, and Mastercard to speed up the response to the COVID-19 pandemic by identifying, assessing, developing, and scaling up treatments.

Researchers from the University of Oxford, Columbia University, UCLA and Erasmus University Medical Center are leading this work through Project SCYLLA (SARS-Cov-2 Large-scale Longitudinal Analyses), one of the emerging efforts to come from OHDSI’s global work surrounding COVID-19 research.

OHDSI is a multi-stakeholder, interdisciplinary collaboration to bring out the value of health data through large-scale analytics. All solutions are open-source. OHDSI has established an international network of researchers and observational health databases with a central coordinating center housed at Columbia University.

“We appreciate that the donors of the Therapeutics Accelerator support OHDSI’s global efforts around studying both the effectiveness and safety of potential COVID-19 medicines,” says George Hripcsak, MD, MS, Chair and Vivian Beaumont Allen Professor of Biomedical Informatics, the central coordinating center of the OHDSI community. “Their funding will help us learn which treatments are showing potential throughout an international cohort of patients. These findings can help us keep our global community healthy while we strive to overcome this pandemic.”

OHDSI’s global efforts around COVID-19 have included research about the characterization of the disease, as well as estimation and prediction studies to inform decision-making during the pandemic. Several studies have been posted to the MedRxiv preprint server while undergoing peer review; they can be found on the OHDSI COVID-19 Updates page.