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Pune Knowledge Cluster (PKC), together with various stakeholders, launched a first-of-its-kind Covid-19 database, which hosts retrospective Covid-19 clinical data of 2,000 patients across Pune.
While talking about the conceptualisation and development of the database at the launch event held on Thursday, Dr Priya Nagaraj, CEO, Pune Knowledge Cluster, said, “The database is a great example of how a cluster approach can be used effectively to bring various stakeholders to work together to solve problems of national relevance at scale.”
Pune Knowledge Cluster is one of the seven Science and Technology Clusters established by the Office of the Principal Scientific Advisor under The City Knowledge and Innovation Cluster Initiative (CKIC).
Highlighting the collaborative effort, she said that the passion, commitment and collective vision of all the partners involved, namely the hospitals — BJ Medical College, Noble Hospital and Symbiosis University Hospital and Research Centre; the research organisations — CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory, and the companies — AIQoD (formerly GI Bots) and EPIC-Health Information Management (EPIC-HIM) was instrumental in bringing the database to fruition.
Dr Rajesh Karyakarte, professor and head, BJ Medical College, said, “Through this database, we can ensure that India puts a step forward in contributing towards medical research for infectious diseases, which we have been unable to do so far, especially in the previous pandemic situations.”
Dr Ameet Dravid, MD, Internal Medicine, Noble Hospital, said, “The world is hungry for data, and it should be put out at the right time. We hope that the insights from this database can be extended for building databases for other diseases, which can be used for understanding real-time disease progression.”
The database captures over 100 different clinical parameters, collected from patient IPD files —including: vitals, supplemental oxygen, lab investigations, pre-existing conditions (such as hypertension, diabetes, cancer) and others.
While talking about the challenges faced during digitisation of the data, Dilip Deshmukh, co-founder and chief mentor, EPIC-HIM, said, “It was important to not only capture the data but also have it in a format that could be analysed. Making the system scalable was also crucial so as to make sure that more data points can be added in the future.”
PKC and partners stressed that the database is open source and the primary aim is to make the data available to all interested stakeholders for further exploratory use. Insights from the stakeholders will be crucial in scaling up the database and helping it evolve into a more user-friendly version.
