5 Studies From The COVID-19 Research Database That Shaped Health Policy And Changed The COVID Conversation

By Quinn Johns

In the early days of the pandemic, Datavant recognized a pressing need for national insight about COVID-19. In collaboration with partners including Change Healthcare, the Health Care Cost Institute, Healthjump, Medidata, Mirador Analytics, Office Ally, PointClickCare, SAS, StataCorp, Snowflake, and Veradigm, we formed the COVID-19 Research Database (CRDB) with a clear goal: provide as much real-world data as possible to academic and medical researchers for free. 

The CRDB provides a longitudinal, connected dataset that contains more than 300 million unique patients. Researcher access is managed by a Scientific Steering Committee which is chaired by Dr. Mark Cullen, formerly of Stanford University. In just under two years since the CRDB’s inception, more than 600 researchers have used the database to study the pandemic’s impact and the effectiveness of our response. They have produced more than 50 publications, which have helped inform pandemic health policy.