Big Data Powers Insights For COVID-19

By David Dyke & Vishal Kapadia

One challenge facing the research community today: acquiring meaningful data sets on the COVID-19 pandemic. The questions asked are still so fundamental – why do some people end up positive but asymptomatic, while others are in respiratory failure? 

The answers to those questions may well lie in the historical medical data for COVID-19 positive patients. More than 1.4 million patients have tested positive for COVID-19 nationwide, and the medical community is accumulating information to further scientific understanding of the disease and the factors influencing its transmission and progression.

Answers require data, and that data has to be accumulated. It’s a tall order. Imagine the scale of collecting a lifetime of medical records for each of the 1.4 million (and growing) cases of Americans testing positive for COVID-19. Getting medical records from every doctor’s office, hospital and urgent care facility in the country into a single system is a convoluted process requiring secure technology and a broad and deep network to curate medical data.