The Accrual to Clinical Trials Network, or ACT for short (https://www.actnetwork.us/national), is a Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program-wide federated network that aims to significantly increase participant accrual into clinical trials. ACT currently has 48 CTSA sites connected to the network and consists of data derived from the electronic medical records of over 125 million patients. ACT helps clinical investigators with discovering cohorts before the start of a trial, establishing the feasibility of a clinical protocol for grant applications, and with identifying patients from multiple sites. The data available in-network consists of demographics, diagnoses, procedures, laboratory results, and medications. These data are available through a user interface for defining inclusion and exclusion criteria and exploring patient cohorts and potential sites for collaboration. The University of Utah is a participating CTSA site on the ACT network.
The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) (https://covid.cd2h.org/N3C) is a clinical repository that is being established to address critical research questions related to the COVID‑19 pandemic. The goals of N3C are to enable rapid collection of clinical data at the peak of the pandemic in order to contribute towards an understanding of the disease, inform the design of clinical studies and trials, and identification of effective interventions. N3C aggregates clinical data derived from electronic medical records of patients who were tested for COVID-19 (positive and negative results) at CTSA program institutions and partners. Limited datasets consisting of demographics, diagnoses, procedures, laboratory results, and medications harmonized to the OMOP model are being stored in the repository and will be available within the National Institutes of Health’s analytics environment. The University of Utah is participating in this national endeavor and is contributing its data.
For information and access to these national networks, please contact the Biomedical Informatics Core, Center for Clinical and Translational Science by filling out the form at https://ctsi.utah.edu/cores-and-services/bmic or sending an email to helpdesk@ccts.utah.edu.