NIH COVID RADx® Data Hub

The unprecedented, global COVID-19 crisis is applying pressure on our research community and federal agencies to advance a new, rapid approach to develop treatments, vaccines, therapies, and diagnostics to help address the immense public health issues arising from the pandemic.

As the world’s largest biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has a critical role to play in driving and accelerating the understanding of COVID-19. To this end, NIH is spearheading a cutting-edge research effort to comprehensively explore how the virus functions, how it affects vulnerable and at-risk populations, and how we can effectively combat it now and into the future.

In the area of COVID-19 diagnostic technologies, NIH is leading the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative, which supports research involving a wide range of tests for diagnosing and predicting SARS CoV2 infection, along with serological tests to flag viral exposure. These diagnostic initiatives are rooted in an understanding that there is an urgent need to protect individuals from coronavirus exposure while allowing society to return to normal functioning as quickly as possible. As part of the overall RADx effort, NIH is committed on ensuring that underserved populations have access to testing and data.

Research efforts in the diagnostic space are generating important information to characterize the current state of the pandemic and facilitate understanding of how COVID-19 will impact populations in the longer-term. However, with myriad unique RADx research projects taking place around the world, there is a need for a functional and secure combined COVID-19 data platform that allows investigators focused on basic science, translational research, public health, and other disciplines to make discoveries that might not be possible using individual, siloed data sets.

NIH has developed the COVID RADx Data Hub to serve as that collective data repository. This merging of diverse datasets creates a corpus of de-identified data and digital assets that spans across the NIH Institutes and Centers (ICs) and into the broader research community. These data and assets are aggregated in a way that provides maximum utility to researchers.

Researchers can take advantage of datasets and analytic tools to inform patient care, validate public health measures, drive innovation toward more user-friendly technologies, help stop the spread of the virus, and leave us better equipped to address future pandemics. Such a coordinated data strategy is paramount to achieving rapid scientific progress in battling COVID-19.

The Hub consists of five major components that helps end-users in viewing published studies.

The five components of the Hub are:

• Study Creation and File Upload

• Study Approval

• Metadata Repository (MDR)

• Study and File Search

• Researcher Workspace

The detail about these components are explained in further chapters in this document.

Welcome

• Overview
• Home Page

Researcher

• 1. Account Resources
• 2. Logging In
• 3. Searching for Studies
• 4. Searching for Files
• 5. Requesting Access to Studies
• 6. Favorite Studies
• 7. Workspace

Data Coordinating Centers Administrator C(DCC)

• 1. Logging In
• 2. Creating a Study
• 3. Searching for Studies
• 4. Reviewing, Editing, and Submitting a Study
• 5. Add, View, and Delete Data Files via UI
• 6. Add, View, and Delete Metadata Files via UI
• 7. Add Data Files via sFTP

Data Hub Data Administrator

• 1. Logging In
• 2. Searching for Studies
• 3. Searching for Files
• 4. Approving/Rejecting Data Files and Studies
• 5. Deleting a Data File

Change History and Tracking

• 1. Change History
• 2. Notifications