24 September 2020 - - Canada-based PointClickCare, a cloud-based software platform for the senior care market, will be joining the coalition of healthcare companies that have launched the COVID-19 Research Database, a secure repository of HIPAA-compliant, de-identified and limited patient-level data sets made available pro bono to public health and policy researchers to extract insights to help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, the company said.

In joining the database, PointClickCare will mitigate an important gap in researchers' understanding of COVID-19: specifically, how the disease impacts patients who are receiving care in post-acute care settings.

The database is a cross-industry collaboration made up of research groups and various leading healthcare corporations all focused on solving questions related to COVID-19, such as evaluations of drug effectiveness utilizing de-identified electronic health record and claims data, identifying which demographic factors and pre-existing conditions are most closely correlated with ventilator support or excess mortality, and measuring the public health impact of quarantine measures put in place in different geographies.

The scientific steering committee, composed of leading academic researchers from numerous institutions and chaired by Mark Cullen, the Founding director of the Center for Population Health Sciences and a Professor of Medicine, Biomedical Data Science, and Health Research and Policy at Stanford University, has received more than 150 study proposals.

Early studies coming out of the database have analyzed the optimal policy structure to mitigate spread, examined mortality by demographic group, and analyzed how COVID-19 has changed the utilization of non-COVID-19 related healthcare services.

Senior care insights will be made possible by Lighthouse, PointClickCare's initiative aimed at providing healthcare organizations, government agencies and life sciences companies with de-identified data from consenting providers regarding older adults.

Lighthouse's mission is to provide data and insights that specifically represent seniors, a population often considered to be at higher risk for severe illness, and to support research by expanding drug discovery and development.