RADx-UP Program Addresses Data Gaps in Underrepresented Communities

Guest post by Richard J. Hodes, MD, Director, National Institute on Aging, and Eliseo Pérez-Stable, MD, Director, National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, NIH.

A few months into the COVID-19 pandemic, we shared how NIH was working to speed innovation in the development, commercialization, and implementation of technologies for COVID-19 through NIH’s Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative.

Two years later, one of the RADx programs—RADx Underserved Populations (RADx-UP)—reflects on lessons learned that have broken the mold of standard research paradigms to address health disparities.

RADx-UP has presented unique challenges in terms of data collection, privacy concerns, measurement standardization, principles of data-sharing, and the opportunity to reexamine community-engaged research. Establishment of Common Data Elements (CDEs)—standardized, precisely defined questions paired with a set of allowable responses used systematically across different sites, studies, or clinical trials to ensure that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts—are not commonly used in community-engaged research. Use of CDEs enables data harmonization, aggregation, and analysis of related data across study sites as well as the ability to investigate relationships among data in unrelated data sets. CDEs can also lend statistical power to analyses of data for small subpopulations typically underrepresented in research.

RADx-UP is a community-engaged research program that builds on years of developing partnerships between communities and scientists. RADx-UP has funded 127 research projects with sites in every state and six U.S. territories as well as a RADx-UP Coordination and Data Collection Center (CDCC). RADx-UP assesses the needs and barriers related to COVID-19 testing and increase access to COVID-19 testing in underserved and vulnerable populations experiencing the highest rates of disparities in morbidity and mortality.

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated establishing RADx-UP and its associated CDEs with unprecedented speed relying heavily on data elements derived from those already defined in the NIH-based PhenX Toolkit and Disaster Research Response (DR2) resources. The short time frame for this process did not allow for as extensive collaboration and input from RADx-UP investigators and community partners that would have been ideal. Additionally, many researchers, especially community partners engaged in RADx-UP projects, were not familiar with CDE data collection practices. As a result, CDE questionnaires had to be modified as studies progressed to better suit the needs of the consortium and investigators new to CDE collection had to be familiarized with these processes quickly. NIH program officers, NIH RADx-UP and CDCC leadership and engagement impact teams (EITs)—staff liaisons provided by the CDCC that link RADx-UP research teams to testing, data, and community-engagement resources—helped research teams implement and adjust CDE collection, ensured alignment across consortium research teams, and assisted with other data-related issues that arose.

All RADx programs are required to collect a standardized set of CDEs, including sociodemographic, medical history, and health status elements with the intent to provide researchers rapid access to data for secondary research analyses in the RADx Data Hub, the central repository for RADx data. However, implementation of CDEs in the context of underserved communities in the rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic presented complex issues for consideration.

Some of these issues included data privacy, the risk of re-identification of underserved and undocumented populations, and data collection burden on participants as well as researchers. The privacy of health data is protected under federal law. The RADx-UP program instituted measures to ensure program participants’ data remain protected and de-identified using a token-based hashing algorithm methodology that allows researchers to share individual-level participant data without exposing personally identifiable information. To address data collection and respondent burden concerns, projects modified questions to allow some flexibility in expanding response options more appropriate to some underserved communities. The CDCC also developed COLECTIV, a digital interface for projects to directly enter data into the data repository and included gateway questions to relieve respondent burden.

Respect for Tribal Data Sovereignty

RADx-UP leadership and investigators recognized that additional considerations for tribal sovereignty, practices, and policies needed to be addressed for projects that include American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) participants. Through consultations with the NIH Tribal Advisory Committee and the broader AI/AN community and meetings with an informal RADx-UP AI/AN project working group established by the CDCC, NIH realized that deposition of tribal data into the RADx Data Hub would not meet the cultural, governance, or sovereignty needs of AI/AN RADx research data. In response, NIH hopes to establish a RADx Tribal Data Repository (TDR) responsible for the collection, protection, and sharing of data collected in AI/AN communities with respect for the practices and policies of Tribal data sovereignty. Applications for the repository have been solicited and NIH hopes to make an award for the TDR sometime in FY23.

Rapid Data Sharing

One of the largest hurdles the RADx-UP program has faced is implementing rapid sharing of research data for secondary analyses and to inform decision-making and public health practices related to the COVID-19 pandemic. RADx-UP research teams are expected to share their data on a timely cadence before data collection ends. This is a far more stringent practice relative to the current standard NIH data-sharing policy that requires data to be shared at the time of acceptance for publication of the main findings from the final data set. NIH and CDCC staff have worked together with the RADx research community to highlight the importance of and compliance with rapid data-sharing. Within the first six months, a total of 69 Phase 1 projects began transmitting CDE data to the RADx-UP CDCC. The COVID-19 pandemic posed a tremendous challenge, and NIH responded by collaborating with vulnerable and underserved communities. This collaboration has opened an unprecedented opportunity to build on a now established foundation for future research to address gaps in understanding the broader social, cultural, and structural factors that influence disparities in morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 and other diseases. Data collection and sharing efforts of the RADx-UP initiative comprise a significant contribution. Collaboration among the NIH, research investigators, and communities impacted by COVID-19 has been the catalyst. To learn more about RADx-UP, please visit a recent journal article available on PubMed.