Evidence map›Paper›PMID 34042100›Full record

ArticleJMIRx med

Why We Are Losing the War Against COVID-19 on the Data Front and How to Reverse the Situation.

David Prieto-Merino, Rui Bebiano Da Providencia E Costa, Jorge Bacallao Gallestey, Reecha Sofat, Sheng-Chia Chung, Henry Potts

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JMIRx med. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
1citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

1 citing paper in PubMed.

  1. Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

6 authors.

David Prieto-MerinoFaculty of Epidemiology & Population Health London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine London United Kingdom.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5001-0061
Rui Bebiano Da Providencia E CostaInstitute of Health Informatics University College London London United Kingdom.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9141-9883
Jorge Bacallao GallesteyUniversity of Medical Sciences Havana Cuba.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7961-9970
Reecha SofatInstitute of Health Informatics University College London London United Kingdom.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0242-6115
Sheng-Chia ChungInstitute of Health Informatics University College London London United Kingdom.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6025-9207
Henry PottsInstitute of Health Informatics University College London London United Kingdom.ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6200-8804

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

With over 117 million COVID-19-positive cases declared and the death count approaching 3 million, we would expect that the highly digitalized health systems of high-income countries would have collected, processed, and analyzed large quantities of clinical data from patients with COVID-19. Those data should have served to answer important clinical questions such as: what are the risk factors for becoming infected? What are good clinical variables to predict prognosis? What kinds of patients are more likely to survive mechanical ventilation? Are there clinical subphenotypes of the disease? All these, and many more, are crucial questions to improve our clinical strategies against the epidemic and save as many lives as possible. One might assume that in the era of big data and machine learning, there would be an army of scientists crunching petabytes of clinical data to answer these questions. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Our health systems have proven to be completely unprepared to generate, in a timely manner, a flow of clinical data that could feed these analyses. Despite gigabytes of data being generated every day, the vast quantity is locked in secure hospital data servers and is not being made available for analysis. Routinely collected clinical data are, by and large, regarded as a tool to inform decisions about individual patients, and not as a key resource to answer clinical questions through statistical analysis. The initiatives to extract COVID-19 clinical data are often promoted by private groups of individuals and not by health systems, and are uncoordinated and inefficient. The consequence is that we have more clinical data on COVID-19 than on any other epidemic in history, but we have failed to analyze this information quickly enough to make a difference. In this viewpoint, we expose this situation and suggest concrete ideas that health systems could implement to dynamically analyze their routine clinical data, becoming learning health systems and reversing the current situation.

Indexed as

COVID-19learning health systems

Identifiers

PMID34042100
PMCPMC8104306

What OpenQuestion holds

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LicenceCC BY
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.