Real-World Evidence from Pakistan to Manage COVID-19 in the Global South

Haroon Hafeez of Shaukat Khanum Memorial Cancer Hospital and Research Centre in Pakistan will integrate COVID-19 data from Pakistan into existing harmonized datasets from over 500 million people across the world, to better inform public health strategies. International data on COVID-19 is needed to help lift the world out of the pandemic. However, there is little real-world data from South Asia or Brazil. They will map the anonymized electronic medical records from over 7.8 million people, including over 20,000 COVID-19 positive patients, from a hospital in Lahore to the common data model known as OMOP, which brings together disparate data into a common format. They will run analytical tools on these mapped data to characterize COVID-19 forms and disease outcomes, to quantify the use of COVID-19 treatments in routine practice and to identify risk factors that can be used to predict disease severity and help better manage patients.