The Biostatistics Unit at the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP), in collaboration with researchers from several Catalan healthcare and research institutions, has published the DIVINE study database in Scientific Data, a Nature Portfolio journal. This journal specialises in the publication of datasets and promotes the accessibility, proper documentation and reusability of these resources by the scientific community.
The cohort includes clinical information from 5,813 patients hospitalised with COVID-19 during four waves of the pandemic, between March 2020 and August 2021, across five hospitals in the southern metropolitan area of Barcelona. The database contains information collected during hospitalisation and follow-up, including clinical characteristics, risk factors, treatments received and hospital outcomes.
The data have been published as an R package on CRAN , with an associated GitHub repository and a Zenodo record , facilitating access, traceability and reuse. The dataset has been anonymised and can be used to study the progression of patients hospitalised with COVID-19, identify factors associated with clinical outcomes and validate predictive models. It can also serve as a teaching resource in fields such as biostatistics and epidemiology.
The cohort has already contributed to several studies on in-hospital mortality, long-term sequelae, patient stratification and the development of predictive models. With this publication, the authors are making the dataset available to the scientific community to facilitate its reuse in future studies and contribute to more open, reproducible and efficient research.
Cristian Tebé, head of the Biostatistics Unit at IGTP, highlights that "making clinical research data openly available is not only an act of transparency, but also an ethical commitment to science and society. It enables data reuse, the reproduction of analyses, the expansion of knowledge and the acceleration of research, while avoiding the unnecessary duplication of studies".
The DIVINE cohort is the result of a collaborative effort involving clinicians, researchers and biostatisticians from several Catalan healthcare and academic institutions. The project began during the first wave of the pandemic with the creation of a data collection system by the Infectious Diseases Service at Bellvitge University Hospital and biostatisticians from the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), and was subsequently expanded through the participation of additional institutions. Researchers from IGTP, Bellvitge University Hospital, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Universitat de Barcelona, Consorci Sanitari Integral, Consorci Sanitari Alt Penedès Garraf, Viladecans Hospital, Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu Institute for Research and Innovation in Life and Health Sciences in Central Catalonia and the CIBER in Infectious Diseases participated in this work, representing the MetroSud and DIVINE groups.
