'It will be a game changer': Mayo Clinic partners on global Covid-19 database
On Tuesday, Mayo Clinic announced a partnership with the Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) to form the first global registry of Covid-19 patient data, built to analyze the best ways hospitals around the world are treating patients with the disease.
Researchers are hopeful the Viral Infection and Respiratory Illness Universal Study (or VIRUS, an apt acronym) database, held on Mayo Clinic’s REDCap system, will reveal the most successful care and treatment options at hospitals worldwide, leading to a quicker medical consensus on how best to treat Covid-19 patients.
Dr. Rahul Kashyap, a Mayo Clinic researcher and principal investigator of the registry, said the registry is a major step forward in helping all 110 participating hospitals learn from the others’ experiences.
"This dissemination of aggregated knowledge shared in a single database in a timely manner will be essential for comparative effectiveness studies,” said Dr. Kashyap. “It will be a game changer."
The database is able to track how long patients were admitted to the ICU and/or on a ventilator and how effective certain treatments were, in addition to demographic information like age, race and gender. Over 3,400 patients (with names and other certain identifying characteristics removed) representing eight different countries have already been entered into the registry, with that number expected to increase by the day.
Doctors involved in the construction of the registry were talking and tweeting about the need for such a tool in mid-March; on March 31, just two weeks later, the registry became a reality. Dr. Greg Martin, president-elect of SCCM, said the effort to create a tool of this magnitude was nothing short of incredible.
“It’s remarkable how quickly the global medical community came together in an effort to share data and understand this novel virus in ways that will improve patient care,” said Dr. Martin. “Clinicians on the front lines of this pandemic are providing the data in their spare time. The information they are collecting will not only help in the care of current COVID-19 patients but it also will guide how we care for patients in future outbreaks. The more centers around the world that participate, the better the data will be for us all."
Isaac Jahns is a Rochester native and a 2019 graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism. He reports on politics, business and music for Med City Beat.
Cover: screenshot via the Covid-19 Registry
