History – start of the project

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in in the Netherlands (March 2020), there was great uncertainty what was going to happen. Treatments were lacking and the clinical course of COVID-19 was unknown. For this reason, physicians and researchers from Amsterdam UMC and Maastricht UMC+ started a consortium to start the collection of data of COVID-19 patients. This initiative, coined CovidPredict, was in collaboration with the Dutch Association for Intensive Care (NVIC) and the National Intensive Care Evaluation Foundation (NICE). Shortly after its start, many other hospitals joined the initiative. At first, this initiative was two-fold: there was an automated ICU-patient data collection part (COVID-19 ICU Decision Support), and a chart-reviewed data collection part for both ward- and ICU-admitted patients (COVID-19 Clinical Course).
Hospitals throughout the Netherlands were invited to join the consortium: for the ICU Decision support part, for the Clinical Course part, or both. This led to a steady growth of participating hospitals, with over 13000 patients included in the Clinical Course database by the end of 2022. 

As mentioned above, the CovidPredict ICU Decision Support was set up in collaboration with the NVIC and the NICE foundation. Even before the COVID-19 outbreak, these organisations participated in sharing and collecting ICUdata. This is an initiative which aims to combine the data from electronic patient files and electronic monitoring systems on the ICU with artificial intelligence, to gain insight in the effect of treatment by means of machine learning techniques. Because the focus of ICUdata comprises more than COVID-19, and because the data acquisition techniques between de ICU Decision Support and Clinical Course parts of the CovidPredict projects differed (i.e. chart review vs. automated data-extraction), the CovidPredict consortium currently solely focusses on the Clinical Course part of the project. The ICU Decision Support branch is still accommodated with the ICUdata initiative, an ongoing project.