COVID-19 Initiatives

UPIBI: Unified Pandemic Insight and Biomedical Integration Study

Faculty and staff at the Universal Platform for Integrative Biomedical Innovation (UPIBI) are spearheading the development of digital consent systems for participants in the UPIBI COVID-related initiatives. This project is part of a broader biomedical resource supporting consented data and specimen collection for integrative research purposes. Prior to the pandemic, participation was coordinated through in-person interactions. Now, UPIBI teams, in collaboration with institutional technology partners, have successfully transitioned to an electronic consent framework.

Through this initiative, biological materials and related personal health data are being collected from individuals regardless of confirmed exposure to SARS-CoV-2 or the development of COVID-19 symptoms. The purpose is to gain insight into susceptibility, variability in response to infection, and the influence of pre-existing conditions. The collected materials—blood, respiratory and other body fluids, tissues—and related health data are stored to support a range of biomedical investigations.

More details about this initiative can be found here: UPIBI COVID Biobank Initiative

Global EHR Collaboration for Pandemic Analytics (GECPA)

UPIBI researchers actively participate in this global consortium, which focuses on electronic health record (EHR) data analysis to enhance understanding of COVID-19’s clinical patterns. The goal is to support physicians, data scientists, and public health stakeholders with insights derived from standardized clinical data. Data is retained locally across institutions and mapped to unified ontologies to enable reliable cross-site aggregation and comparison.

  • Example publication on global EHR-driven COVID-19 data integration available in Digital Medicine.
  • Research describing the development and validation of severity phenotypes based on international EHR datasets is available in medRxiv.
  • Work on semantic evaluation of COVID-19 medical concepts using computational linguistic models is currently under review.

Genetic Determinants of Viral Susceptibility Consortium

This consortium connects researchers working to uncover how human genetic factors influence COVID-19 susceptibility and severity. The effort aims to inform therapeutic strategies and identify individuals at greater or lesser risk, contributing to a deeper understanding of viral-host interactions. UPIBI’s data resources and analytical teams are contributing results derived from comprehensive genomic and health record analyses.

Consortium homepage: Genetic Susceptibility Research Initiative

COVID-19 Health Experience Survey

To better understand clinical outcomes and contributing health factors, UPIBI designed a survey for patients to self-report COVID-related experiences. Developed in collaboration with a major academic partner and implemented via a secure digital platform, this tool captures relevant data with minimal burden to participants. Designed for use in various settings—from clinics to home isolation—it supports consistent data collection to facilitate comparison across studies and locations.

More on this survey is available at: COVID Health Survey Initiative

  • A detailed overview has been published in a peer-reviewed journal focused on clinical and translational science.

Using EHRs to Coordinate Pandemic Response

This report reflects the experiences of a national network of institutions working to resolve fragmentation in COVID-19 data handling. By leveraging electronic health records (EHRs), the institutions aimed to improve clinical response and public health planning. This collaborative effort identifies key challenges in current data infrastructures and proposes solutions including standardized registries and interoperable data frameworks.

  • A collaborative publication outlines these strategies, describing how EHRs supported real-time pandemic decision-making across multiple U.S. medical centers.

UPIBI COVID-19 i2b2 Research Environment

UPIBI maintains a COVID-19 clinical data repository using the i2b2 (Integrating Biology and the Bedside) framework, enabling federated data access across affiliated institutions. This resource aggregates electronic health records for individuals tested for COVID-19, supporting large-scale analysis of disease characteristics. With over 100,000 patients and expanding, all clinical information is standardized to biomedical terminologies, in alignment with open-source COVID-19 ontologies.

UPIBI’s Clinical Informatics Core collaborates with institutional data offices to facilitate query services and investigator support for research utilizing the COVID-19 i2b2 system.

© 2025 The Universal Platform for Integrative Biomedical Innovation