ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ Researchers Can Now Apply for Access to the N3C Data Enclave

National COVID Cohort Collaborative Logo

ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ has signed an institutional Data Use Agreement (DUA) with the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). Through this master agreement, ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ faculty members (who receive their compensation directly from ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½) are eligible to submit Data Use Requests (DURs) to the National Covid Cohort Collaborative (N3C). As each CTSC hospital partner executes an institutional DUA with NCATS, faculty members at those institutions will become eligible to submit DURs according to their respective local institutional policies. The N3C Data Access Committee (DAC), a team of federal employees with appropriate scientific, bioethics, information technology, and/or human subjects research expertise review and approve all requests for use of N3C data.

Investigators wishing to submit DURs to the N3C are encouraged to look at the following N3C FAQ site:  paying particular attention to the About the Data and Use the Data sections.

IMPORTANT: Prior to submitting a DUR through the required direct registration with the N3C, it is strongly suggested that all faculty wishing to utilize the N3C Data Enclave visit SPARCRequest and add "N3C Data Access Request" under Informatics to your cart and continue through the prompts to complete your submission. CTSC informatics technical staff have experience with the OMOP common data model used as the underlying data model for the N3C enclave, and they will be able to answer preliminary questions regarding data format and content.

The three types of data access levels within the N3C Data Enclave are:

  1. Synthetic Data Set â€“ artificial, statistically-comparable, computational derivative of the original data; it does not contain individually identifiable health information.
  2. De-identified Data Set â€“ Patient data that has been stripped of PHI identifiers as defined by HIPAA - will require ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ approval prior to submission of the DUR.
  3. Limited Data Set â€“ Patient data that includes only two of the 18 elements defined as PHI by HIPAA (dates of service and patient zip code) – will require ÐÇ¿Õ´«Ã½ IRB determination letter and approval prior to submission of the DUR.

Finally, projects that are currently underway within the N3C enclave can be viewed and searched here: