STSS PROGRAM SUPPORT & STSS COVID-19 EMERGENCY RESPONSE SUPPORT

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 program is essentially a medium sized business, consisting of thousands of researchers, requiring enterprise level information technology (IT) support as part of a virtual research organization (VRO). This contract is necessary to ensure that NCATS and N3C can continue to provide adequate support for a secure, collaborative, VRO. This contract allows for continued support of the VRO which supports all of the required information technology functions to support an environment of over 4,000 users, including cloud-based productivity tools, a service desk, commercial and open-source deployments of analytical tools for the community to use, and expansion of the data types available for analysis, such as imaging, viral variant genomic sequences, etc.

The common need is to share a collaborative cloud environment capable of ingesting billions of data points and performing a variety of complex analyses against multimodal data types, ranging from pathology and radiology data, synthetic data, genomic information, electronic health records (EHRs) and a wide variety of others. All of this must be done while meeting the highest levels of security and privacy, given the sensitivity of some of the data types being collected and the importance of the work being done in the environment. This contract provides support for all of these enterprise IT efforts.