Institutional Characteristics Associated with Accessing and Sharing EHR Data with the National COVID Cohort...

The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) is one of the largest centralized, individual-level clinical data repositories for COVID-19 research in the US. Some institutions do not share data with N3C. We sought to define factors associated with N3C clinical data sharing to identify potential addressable barriers for future data sharing initiatives.

We accessed public data to derive institutional variables representative of leadership, informatics expertise, and resources.

N3C data sharing institutions were more likely to have active National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences funding, have affiliated departments, centers, or institutes of biomedical informatics, and active Fellows of the American College of Medical Informatics faculty compared with institutions that did not share data with N3C.

While we identified specific institutional characteristics associated with N3C data sharing, there are likely other characteristics associated with institutional data sharing decisions. Understanding factors that motivate or deter institutional clinical data sharing for research is key to addressing barriers and making more data open.