SECURE PLATFORMS SUPPORT FOR THE N3C DATA ENCLAVE (COVID-19)

National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative (N3C): The National COVID-19 Cohort Collaborative (N3C) sponsors the NIH COVID-19 Data Enclave, https://covid.cd2h.org/, one of the largest data enclaves in the world supporting COVID-19 research. N3C is a partnership among the NCATS-supported Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs, the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), and the NIGMS-supported Institutional Development Award Networks for Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR), with overall stewardship by NCATS.

The N3C Data Enclave is a secure platform storing harmonized clinical data provided by more than 60 contributing members. The Enclave hosts over 670 million clinical observations on over 6.8 million persons, including over 2.2 million COVID cases, amounting to more than 7.8 billion rows of data. To protect privacy, this data consists only of limited data sets, de-identified data sets, and synthetic data sets; there is no personally identifiable information kept in the Enclave.

The Enclave resides in the NCATS Secure Scientific Platforms Environment. The Environment is a specialized cloud-based data aggregation and analytics enclave that can integrate, manage, secure, and analyze any kind of scientific data, and provide secure, controlled access to internal and external collaborators. Within the Environment, multiple NIH ICs, Federal agencies, and Federal task forces integrate, manage, secure, and analyze all types of scientific data using dedicated platforms, and, equally importantly, make that data available in specific and controlled collaborations with each other and with external collaborators.