Northwest Healthcare Receives COVID-19 Data Registry Grant from Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

8/10/2020

Tucson, AZ (August 10, 2020) – Northwest Healthcare has been awarded a prestigious grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation’s largest philanthropy dedicated solely to health. The collaborative, multi-institutional, nationwide grant is to help establish a national data registry network for COVID-19.

“We are honored to receive this funding which will allow us to contribute in a significant way to the research being conducted on a national level,” said Jennifer Schomburg, chief executive officer at Northwest Medical Center. “Our team is doing extraordinary work with COVID-19 patients here in Tucson, and we are excited to participate in something that will have a long term benefit to patients all over the country.”

COVID-19 is quickly becoming the third most prevalent disease in our society, after heart disease and cancer. Because it is so new, more data is needed to help researchers understand the disease process. As part of this national data registry, Northwest Medical Center and Oro Valley Hospital will be sharing de-identified data from COVID-19 patients to help physicians, researchers, and data scientists learn more about the disease.

“We will scrutinize de-identified data for both symptomatic and pre-symptomatic patients,” said Zain Khalpey, MD, Ph.D., FACS, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Northwest Medical Center and Principal Investigator for the grant. “Eventually, the hope is that critical data like this will help us predict who will become gravely ill, and who we can diagnose sooner with silent hypoxia or with infectious pre-symptomatic disease. Understanding the disease in a preemptive way may help keep the engine of the hospital moving, prepare our communities better and allay our anxiety of the pandemic.”

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