Hello, everyone! It has been a busy quarter and we are excited to share an update regarding ADVANCE activities from the past few months.
RECENTLY SUBMITTED ADVANCE PROPOSALS
This past quarter, we submitted two ADVANCE proposals:
- Equity in Treatment for Asthma Between Latinos and Whites (EQUITABLE): Led by Oregon Health and Science University’s Dr. John Heintzman, this National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) R01 submission seeks to compare healthcare utilization and quality among Latino adults with asthma compared to non-Hispanic white adults.
- Assess insurance Coverage Expansion on Diabetes complications (ACE-D): Led by OHSU’s Dr. Natalie Huguet, this Centers for Disease Control (CDC) U01 submission seeks to examine the impact of the Affordable Care Act on diabetes outcomes.
Congratulations to the investigators and their proposal teams for their submissions! We look forward to hearing from funders soon.
DATAVANT DEATH INDEX
Excitingly, ADVANCE acquired access to additional supplemental data on patient dates of death.
Overview
- Datavant’s Death Index is a dataset containing information on deceased individuals in the United States and Canada.
- It contains over 100 million historical deaths, with over 50 thousand deaths added weekly.
- Datavant’s Death Index enables us to securely determine which individuals in a particular dataset (such as a set of claims, EHR data, or other data sets) are now deceased. Matching is done using secure, de-identified tokens.
Data Sources
- Datavant’s Death Index combines death records sourced from the NTIS Social Security Administration’s Death Master File (referred to as “SSA”) as well as third party data from public and private obituaries (referred to as “Obit” data) from 2010 onward. About 99.6% of the data is on deaths in the United States, and the rest are from Canada.
- Datavant processes data from these two sources on a weekly basis and combines them into a single, deduplicated table.
How do you access the Datavant Death Index? The index will be housed at OCHIN under the regulatory guidance of the Master License Agreement. The Datavant death index is available to use by all ADVANCE partners for any study. If any ADVANCE partner is interested in using the index for a project, please reach out to Rebecca Block (blockr@ochin.org) or Pedro Rivera (riverap@ochin.org).
PATIENT ENGAGEMENT PANEL
The PREVENT-D team and OCHIN Patient Engagement Panel contributed to the recently released video introducing the Natural Experiments in Translation for Diabetes (NEXT-D2) Consortium! This team of researchers, clinicians, and community members lead eight different studies across the US and work to better understand which health policies and treatments help improve diabetes care and how to prevent diabetes in the first place. Watch the video here.
The PEP met with the PREVENT-D Team to discuss the NEXT-D2 Engagement Paper Dissemination Brief Highlights. The PREVENT-D Project Manager, Nate Warren, led a riveting presentation and discussed the importance of making study information available to patients and the PEP provided detailed feedback on ways to improve the brief. We look forward to seeing the changes applied in response to PEP feedback! Thanks to Nate and the PREVENT-D team for all your work with the PEP!
DATA UPDATE
The table below provides a look at how the ADVANCE patient counts have grown since the start of the year:
GRAND ROUNDS
In light of the continued community spread of COVID-19, we will be rescheduling our April and May Grand Rounds events. If you have any questions or concerns, or would like to be added to our Grand Rounds mailing list, please email William Pinnock at pinnockw@ochin.org.
As always, we greatly appreciate your continued support. Thank you for your continued interest in the work of ADVANCE—we look forward to sharing more next time!
Thank you,
The OCHIN ADVANCE Team
