A Rapid Research Platform to Inform Prevention and Improve the Clinical Management of COVID‑19 Illness for Priority Older Adult Groups: The Ontario Multi-Regional Hospital Coronavirus Registry (COREG)
Older adults are the more vulnerable to developing COVID‑19 and its complications, particularly home care and retirement home residents. Older persons are also less likely to regain full functional and health recovery after a COVID‑19 illness. We have little information on why some people develop severe COVID-19; and how COVID‑19 may affect older adults in Canada. There is no information on the medium- and long-term outcomes in survivors and how we can improve their recovery rate and prevent health and functional loss. Rapid large-scale Canadian data platforms, with detailed information on patients with COVID‑19 and their clinical course, are needed to address these questions and help plan strategies that can limit the spread and the impact of COVID‑19 in older adults now and in the future. We are launching the Ontario Multi-Regional Hospital Coronavirus Registry (COREG), a platform that collects detailed case data on confirmed COVID‑19 inpatients, and outpatients, in collaboration with the World Health Organization. We will address these critical gaps, with linkage to provincial data to identify risk factors for severe COVID‑19 and death in older adults in the general population, home care, and retirement homes in Ontario. The COREG platform will document the clinical course to 9 months, to study the functional recovery and the need for targeted rehabilitative treatments. COREG will provide rapid high-quality evidence to improve the prevention and clinical management of COVID‑19 for older adults in Canada, and internationally. COREG will also provide researchers and partners with complete and in-depth regional and individual-level clinical data on COVID‑19 to inform rapid decision-making and projections, sub-studies, extensions, and linkage for all affected populations.
