National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)

With stewardship from NCATS, more than 75 institutions worked together to build this extensive database. The large, centralized data resource allowed research teams to study COVID-19 and identify potential treatments as the pandemic evolved. 

N3C Overview

The N3C is a partnership among many organizations to provide clinical data in close to real time to improve our knowledge of COVID-19 and potential treatment strategies.

Since September 2020, the N3C has made data accessible to more than 3,000 researchers and clinicians to study the progression of COVID-19, identify risk and protective factors, search for effective treatments, understand the long-term disease effects, and determine how best to care for those with the disease.

N3C partners include the following:

• Health care providers that provide the data in the N3C, including NCATS Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program and the institutions supported by the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences’ Institutional Development Award Networks for Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR).
• The National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), which guides and governs the collaborative science environment within the N3C.
• NCATS, which provides governance, oversight and a secure research platform — the N3C Data Enclave — to maintain and protect the data.
• The scientific community and research leaders with data science and clinical expertise who harmonize data so that it can be studied together and compared across the nation.

Making COVID Data More Available for Research

The N3C receives patient information from more than 60 health care institutions across the country. We harmonize data from these institutions into a single format and make them available for researchers and clinicians inside the N3C Data Enclave so they can study COVID-19 and potential treatments as the pandemic evolves. The N3C Data Enclave is a secure, cloud-based research environment with a powerful analytics platform provided, which serves as the steward of N3C’s data. Data cannot be removed from the N3C Data Enclave.

Since the N3C Data Enclave opened to researchers in September 2020, researchers have used the data to improve our understanding of COVID-19 and health equity, diabetes, cancer, COVID-19 medications and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Researchers currently are studying HIV and COVID-19 risk, mortality rates in rural populations, long COVID and much more using the N3C Data Enclave.

Learn more:

• Browse N3C Data Enclave research projects
• See a list of publications related to the N3C
• Explore the N3C public health data browser

Data Security and Privacy

We know that the data we receive represent people and, as the steward of the data, we take the responsibility for keeping those data safe very seriously. We have taken a comprehensive approach to address the security of the N3C Data Enclave and to protect patient privacy.

We follow all applicable policies and regulations, have integrated key privacy measures into the N3C Data Enclave and its governance processes, and perform security testing and monitoring of activity inside the N3C Data Enclave. We also require researchers to, among other things, adhere to a code of conduct, sign an agreement with NCATS outlining terms and conditions for using the data, and take NIH information technology security training.

The following table — showing the N3C’s four pillars of data protection — provides additional detail about the steps we take to keep data secure and protect patient privacy.

Learn more:

• See our Privacy and Security FAQs.
• Read the requirements researchers must meet to access N3C data.
• Read the N3C Data User Code of Conduct.
• Access the N3C Community Guiding Principles document.