Opening Brazilian COVID-19 patient data to support world research on pandemics
Mello, Luiz E., Andrea Suman, Cláudia Bauzer Medeiros, Claudio Almeida Prado, Edgar Gil Rizzatti, Fátima L. S. Nunes, Gabriela F. Barnabé, João Eduardo Ferreira, José Luiz Silva Sá, Luiz F. L. Reis, Luiz Vicente Rizzo, Luzia Sarno, Raphael de Lamonica, Rui M. B. Maciel, Roberto Marcondes Cesar-Jr, Rodrigo Franco de Carvalho
Abstract
This paper describes the COVID-19 DataSharing/BR initiative, a pioneer public-private<br> partnership to publish open data on Brazilian COVID-19 patients. Constructed in record time, it<br> has been launched with clinical, laboratory and diagnostic data from approximately 177,000 Brazilian<br> individuals, in answer to researchers’ demand for quality data. COVID-19 DataSharing/BR was<br> created by a consortium led by FAPESP (Sao Paulo Research Foundation) and USP (University<br> of Sao Paulo, Brazil), with participation from three major private health institutions in Brazil –<br> Fleury Institute, Sírio-Libanês Hospital and Albert Einstein Hospital. Launched on July 1st, 2020,<br> within 10 days it had already been subject to 800 downloads from 14 different countries.This<br> text provides a brief description of the initiative, and initial efforts for preprocessing and<br> publishing the data according to legal and interoperability constraints. The COVID-19<br> DataSharing/BR repository took only one month from inception to delivery, thanks to the support<br> of a pre-existing extensible open research data e-infrastructure.