Supporting researchers to improve understanding of COVID-19

Discover-NOW, the Health Data Research Hub for Real World Evidence, is proudly supporting the national effort of research into improving our understanding of Covid-19 and the impact on our communities and healthcare sector.

By working in collaboration with representatives from existing data access groups across North West London to establish the COVID-19 NWL Data Prioritisation Group, the Hub is helping to ensure that research requests to access NWL’s depersonalised Covid-19 linked dataset can be reviewed in a timely manner and with the appropriate rigour and governance.

This group is aimed at both operational and research related requests to access depersonalised data for Covid-19 related issues. Discover-NOW is hosting the online access request form supporting researchers to push forward their work and submit requests as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Already, this Group has seen over 21 projects approved with new requests being submitted and reviewed each week. All successful projects can be viewed via the online group project tracker. This tracker already highlights the breadth of this work from exploring COVID-19 in patients with diabetes, to the Office of National Statistics exploring at a granular level how individual differences such as ethnicity or occupation may impact the risk of hospitalisation due to COVID-19.

This work builds upon the NWL sector-wide response to Covid-19, which has created this Covid-19 specific depersonalised data set which brings in data from Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, pathology labs and the region’s linked longitudinal data set. This new data set is accessed through Discover-NOW Hub and NIHR Imperial BRC in secure, high-performance environments.

As part of the COVID-19 research response Discover-NOW, through the NWL Health Research register, has promoted to its registrants the opportunity to help contribute to the fight against coronavirus via online research, through two national COVID-19 studies. The NWL Health Research register comprises of over 6,000 NWL residents who have expressed an interest to be contacted about research opportunities relevant to them. The first study run by The University of Edinburgh is ‘CovidLife’ collecting longitudinal data of the psychological, social and economic impacts of the UK Government measures in response to COVID-19.  The second ‘COVIDENCE’ run primarily by Queen Mary University of London aims to identify the highest risk factors for COVID-19 which is being run by a wide range of universities.