The National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C): Rationale, design, infrastructure, and deployment.

OBJECTIVE: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) poses societal challenges that require expeditious data and knowledge sharing. Though organizational clinical data are abundant, these are largely inaccessible to outside researchers. Statistical, machine learning, and causal analyses are most successful with large-scale data beyond what is available in any given organization. Here, we introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), an open science community focused on analyzing patient-level data from many centers. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The Clinical and Translational Science Award Program and scientific community created N3C to overcome technical, regulatory, policy, and governance barriers to sharing and harmonizing individual-level clinical data. We developed solutions to extract, aggregate, and harmonize data across organizations and data models, and created a secure data enclave to enable efficient, transparent, and reproducible collaborative analytics. RESULTS: Organized in inclusive workstreams, we created legal agreements and governance for organizations and researchers; data extraction scripts to identify and ingest positive, negative, and possible COVID-19 cases; a data quality assurance and harmonization pipeline to create a single harmonized dataset; population of the secure data enclave with data, machine learning, and statistical analytics tools; dissemination mechanisms; and a synthetic data pilot to democratize data access. CONCLUSIONS: The N3C has demonstrated that a multisite collaborative learning health network can overcome barriers to rapidly build a scalable infrastructure incorporating multiorganizational clinical data for COVID-19 analytics. We expect this effort to save lives by enabling rapid collaboration among clinicians, researchers, and data scientists to identify treatments and specialized care and thereby reduce the immediate and long-term impacts of COVID-19

Differential cross-section measurements of the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets using the ATLAS detector

Differential cross-sections are measured for the production of four charged leptons in association with two jets. These measurements are sensitive to final states in which the jets are produced via the strong interaction as well as to the purely-electroweak vector boson scattering process. The analysis is performed using proton-proton collision data collected by ATLAS at √s = 13 TeV and with an integrated luminosity of 140 fb−1. The data are corrected for the effects of detector inefficiency and resolution and are compared to state-of-the-art Monte Carlo event generator predictions. The differential cross-sections are used to search for anomalous weak-boson self-interactions that are induced by dimension-six and dimension-eight operators in Standard Model effective field theory

Evaluating the Educational Impact of a Graduate Program in Health-system Pharmacy Administration

Background/Purpose: In 2006, the 2-year combined Masters of Science (MS) in pharmaceutical sciences with specialization in health-system pharmacy administration (HSPA) and Health-System Pharmacy Administration residency program was re-established as a partnership between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) Eshelman School of Pharmacy and local academic medical centers to address the lack of leaders within health-system pharmacy in the state of North Carolina. The objective of this study is to assess how graduates and their employers perceive the MS degree component of the HSPA/MS residency program and its ability to promote relevant outcomes, including fulfillment of the four outcomes and ten identified core competencies of the program. Methods: An electronic survey was used to poll UNC MS program alumni as well as their first supervisor out of HSPA training. Supervisors were asked to compare UNC MS alumni to non-masters trained administrative pharmacists that they had also supervised. Results: UNC MS alumni were found to be statistically superior to non-masters trained alumni in three of four outcomes and eight of ten outcomes. The majority of alumni indicated that they were more likely (57.9%) to remain within the state of NC within the next five years. Supervisors surveyed indicated that they were more likely (80%) to hire MS-trained pharmacists for administrative positions. Conclusion: Didactic training in the form of a master's degree as a part of comprehensive HSPA residency training is important to develop/supplement core skills and knowledge obtained through the experiential program.Doctor of Pharmac

Community pharmacy staff interactions with patients who have risk factors or warning signs of suicide

Background Little is known about community pharmacy staff members’ interactions with patients at risk of suicide. Objectives To: 1) develop a measure to assess the frequency with which pharmacy staff encounter patients with suicide risk factors and warning signs; 2) to assess the measure\u27s validity and reliability; and 3) describe pharmacy staff members\u27 interactions with at-risk patients and their suicide prevention training preferences. Methods A convenience sample of 501 community pharmacy staff members who worked in North Carolina completed an anonymous online survey. A 10-item measure (the Pharmacy Suicide Interaction Scale (PSIS)) assessed how often respondents encountered patients with suicide risk factors or warning signs, and one open-ended question elicited barriers to interacting with these patients. Psychometric analyses, including an exploratory factor analysis, were performed to examine the validity and reliability of the PSIS. Descriptive statistics were calculated, and responses to open-ended questions were analyzed thematically. Results The PSIS possessed two factors (or subscales): a non-verbal suicide warning signs and risk factors subscale (Cronbach\u27s alpha = 0.79) and a verbal warning signs subscale (Cronbach\u27s alpha = 0.67). Respondents who knew a patient who had died by suicide had higher mean scores on the non-verbal and verbal subscales, indicating that the PSIS had construct validity. Many respondents (22.4%) knew a patient who died by suicide, and 21.6% of respondents had patients request a lethal dose of medication. Interactions occurred both face-to-face and over the phone, and respondents most commonly reacted to patients by contacting others or offering emotional support. Few respondents (8.8%) had suicide prevention training or resources, but most (89.6%) desired additional training. Conclusion Many community pharmacy staff members have interacted with patients who exhibited suicide warning signs or died by suicide. Suicide prevention training may help prepare pharmacy staff to recognize, communicate with, and refer at-risk patients