Data Source and Study Design
Our study received Institutional Review Board Approval (HS#: 20-00875).
The study was conducted at a large, New York City based, multi-hospital,
academic medical institution. The institution’s Scientific Computing
team has been maintaining a regularly updated, deidentified, database of
patient-level data from our electronic medical record (EMR) system for
encounters related to COVID19. At the time of data extraction for the
present study, the database included encounters from March
1st, 2020 through August 10th, 2020.
We included all patients who had a healthcare encounter indicating a
positive result for the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
(SARS-CoV2) real-time reverse transcriptase-polymerase-chain-reaction
(RT-PCR) assay test during the study period. We identified patient
characteristics including demographics, comorbidities (including
historical cancer diagnoses), and outcomes from the EMR as well as the
location of the encounter. If patients had multiple encounters, an
encounter with a positive result was chosen, if applicable. If patients
had multiple patient encounters with a positive result, the most severe
encounter was chosen. Patients with missing data on any of the variables
included in the analysis were excluded.