One of UTHSC’s data scientists is applying her extensive expertise in informatics to a national effort to leverage big data in the fight against COVID-19.
Charisse Madlock-Brown, PhD, MLS, and faculty member in Health Informatics and Information Management at UTHSC, is a co-lead for one of the clinical domain teams of the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C). The N3C is a partnership among the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H) and National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)-supported Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs. It includes clinicians, informaticians and biomedical researchers from more than 60 institutions working to turn data from hundreds of thousands of medical records from coronavirus patients into treatments and predictive analytical tools that can help address the evolving pandemic.
Dr. Madlock-Brown is the co-lead for the Social Determinants of Health (SDoH) team. The team’s goal is to identify questions that either validate current research or answer new questions for local policy around COVID-19, the impact of groups experiencing resource challenges, and the impact of the pandemic on inequalities.
“The N3C project has provided researchers from across the country with invaluable resources to identify the social determinants of health (SDoH) related to vulnerability to high COVID-19 incidence and poor outcomes,” Dr. Madlock-Brown said. “As co-lead for the SDoH task team, I can facilitate the development of robust research protocols, integrate various datasets, coordinate training on the N3C platform, collaboratively analyze COVID-19 data, and provide opportunities for investigators to share related research and propose ideas.”
Dr. Madlock-Brown, who is also the Co-Director of UTHSC’s Tennessee Clinical and Translational Science Institute (TN-CTSI) Informatics Core, received training over the summer on the N3C data access platform and is the point of contact for UTHSC’s utilization of N3C. UTHSC researchers interested in COVID and SDoH are free to join and should contact Dr. Madlock-Brown at cmadlock@uthsc.edu.