HCA Healthcare, one of the nation’s leading healthcare providers, today announced that it has formed a consortium of prominent public and private research institutions to use HCA Healthcare’s vast data on COVID-19 hospital care to improve patient outcomes and public knowledge. The institutions – including the federal Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ), Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, Meharry Medical College, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute, and others – will gain access to the data in a research program directed by the HCA Healthcare Research Institute (HRI). As a learning health system, HCA Healthcare collects and analyzes data from its approximately 35 million annual patient encounters to develop technologies and best practices to improve patient care. With support from HCA Healthcare’s Sarah Cannon Research Institute and its precision medicine platform, Genospace, HCA Healthcare created a COVID-19 patient registry at the outset of the pandemic that has since captured data from treating more suspected and positive COVID-19 cases than any other health system in the United States, including more than 110,000 patients who were admitted for inpatient care in 2020. Read more in the full press release here.