MISSISSAUGA, Ontario (September 24, 2020)—PointClickCare, a cloud-based software platform for the senior care market, announced that it would be joining the coalition of health care companies that have launched the COVID-19 Research Database, a secure repository of HIPAA compliant, de-identified and limited patient-level data sets made available pro bono to public health and policy researchers to extract insights to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic. In joining the database, PointClickCare will mitigate an important gap in researchers’ understanding of COVID-19: specifically, how the disease impacts patients who are receiving care in post-acute care settings.
The database is a cross-industry collaboration made up of research groups and various health care corporations all focused on solving questions related to COVID-19, such as evaluations of drug effectiveness utilizing de-identified electronic health record and claims data, identifying which demographic factors and pre-existing conditions are most closely correlated with ventilator support or excess mortality, and measuring the public health impact of quarantine measures put in place in different geographies.
The scientific steering committee, composed of academic researchers from numerous institutions and chaired by Mark Cullen, the Founding Director of the Center for Population Health Sciences and a Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Data Science, and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, has received more than 150 study proposals. Early studies coming out of the database have analyzed the optimal policy structure to mitigate spread, examined mortality by demographic group, and analyzed how COVID-19 has changed the utilization of non-COVID-19 related healthcare services.
Senior care insights will be made possible by Lighthouse, PointClickCare’s initiative aimed at providing health care organizations, government agencies and life sciences companies with de-identified data from consenting providers regarding older adults. Lighthouse’s mission is to provide data and insights that specifically represent seniors, a population often considered to be at higher risk for severe illness, and to support research by expanding drug discovery and development.
In July, PointClickCare announced it was selected by the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) to provide de-identified patient data for the Discovery Viral Infection and Respiratory Illness Universal Study (VIRUS) COVID-19 Registry. VIRUS tracks ICU and hospital care patterns in near real-time to enable evaluation of safety and observational effectiveness of COVID-19 practices and determine practice variations across hospitals. VIRUS is a cross-sectional observational study and registry of eligible adult and pediatric patients admitted to a hospital. Both VIRUS and joining the COVID-19 Research Database present a opportunity to PointClickCare to share de-identified information to contribute to the fight against COVID-19.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced unprecedented challenges to our health care system, and we are committed to doing everything we can to support our customers as they work around the clock to keep the aging population safe,” said Mike Wessinger, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, PointClickCare. “We see contributing to the database as an important step towards mitigating the spread and improving understanding of this illness.”
“Deepening our understanding of how to mitigate the impacts of COVID-19 is critical at this time,” said Travis May, Chief Executive Officer of Datavant, which convened the database coalition, together with industry leaders including Change Healthcare, Healthjump, Medidata, a Dassault Systemes company, Office Ally, Snowflake, Symphony Health, and Veradigm. “We are grateful for PointClickCare’s participation in the database and look forward to the insights that will arise from research within the database.”
