The COVID-19 pandemic led to a huge uptick in research across disciplines. In the first six months after the pandemic hit, 35,000 publications were indexed in PubMed; by the end of the year that number reached 90,000.
“As time went on, it became clear that there was so much that was not known about this disease on so many different levels,” said Merceditas Villanueva, MD, professor of medicine (infectious diseases) and director of the Yale HIV/AIDS Program.
“People across Yale’s Department of Internal Medicine – cardiology, nephrology, rheumatology, endocrinology— were trying to create their own case series and trying to write things up because the world needed descriptions. Everybody was scrambling around trying to make their own databases.”
It became clear that there was a need to streamline the process in order to facilitate research in a more efficient and timely manner. The department tapped F. Perry Wilson, MD, MSCE, associate professor of medicine (nephrology) and public health (chronic disease epidemiology) and director, Clinical Disease and Research Accelerator (CTRA). Wilson had started working on a database even prior to the pandemic.
Using data gathered from 18,000 patients hospitalized with COVID-19 from January 2020 to January 2023, across Yale New Haven Health. Wilson and his colleague Michael Simonov, MD, then director of informatics at CTRA, developed the Department of Medicine Covid X Data Explorer and Repository (DOM-CovX). A paper about the novel database was published in JMIR Formative Research earlier this year.
“With all the talent at Yale, we knew that making a high-quality dataset available would turbocharge our efforts to understand COVID and, at the same time, demonstrate how valuable broad scientific collaboration can be,” Wilson said.
Using the database is a two-step process. Any Yale researcher can access the web-based program initially to gather data and use it to generate a hypothesis.
“So, if you are interested in, say, the difference in COVID death rates between men and women, you can put in that question and a graph will appear that provides relevant data to start making hypotheses,” Villanueva said. “If something pops out at you, you may decide you want to explore it further.”
The next step is to propose a study on the topic and submit it to the university’s Internal Review Board (IRB). If approved, the researcher makes a formal application to the DOM-CovX Explorer board. When they approve the project, the scientists are given access to the full database. In the interest of fostering interdepartmental collaborations the board will also offer to connect researchers whose interests overlap.
“It's really a navigation process through the research enterprise more than just ‘here's the database,’ said Villanueva. “That was the vision behind it.”
Another important goal was to democratize the process so that it’s not only professors who can access the database, but students, fellows, residents, and trainees who are just starting out and don't have the grant funding to pursue big projects.
“We wanted to make this tool highly accessible, even for people without any statistical or epidemiological training,” said Wilson.
As a front-line clinician during COVID, Villaneuva appreciated the opportunity to participate in the academic productivity afforded by the DOM-CovX database.
“Many of my colleagues were heavy in the trenches with the clinical work,” she said. “We had questions that were born out of our direct observation, but we didn't have the time to write them up and conduct further studies. The idea was that that people who were on the front lines would not be deprived of the opportunity to contribute.”
Thus far, the DOM-CovX Explorer has received 40 requests from different groups of scientists at Yale across 15 different surgical and nonsurgical specialties. Data from the repository supported more than 10 grant proposals as well.
“It's our hope that data interfaces like this become more common in the future, so people within and outside of our academic community can satisfy their curiosity, test new hypotheses, or try to confirm the information they are seeing elsewhere,” said Wilson.
Additional authors include Angela Maria Victoria-Castro, MD, MSc; Tanima Arora, MD, MHS; Aditya Biswas, MS; Jameel Alausa, BS; Labeebah Subair, BS; Brett Gerber, BS; Andrew Nguyen, BS; Allen Hsiao, MD, FAAP, FAMIA; Richard Hintz, MS; Yu Yamamoto, MS; Robert Soufer, MD; and Gary Désir, MD.
The Department of Internal Medicine at Yale School of Medicine is among the nation's premier departments, bringing together an elite cadre of clinicians, investigators, educators, and staff in one of the world's top medical schools. To learn more, visit Internal Medicine.