Evaluation of post-acute COVID-19 health outcomes (ECHOES) in England: The development of national surveillance system for long- term health outcomes following COVID-19

IntroductionElectronic health records can be used to understand the diverse presentation of post-acute and long-term health outcomes following COVID-19 infection. In England, the UK Health Security Agency in collaboration with the University of Oxford have created the ECHOES dataset to monitor how an initial SARS-CoV-2 infection episode is associated with changes in the risk of health outcomes that are recorded in routinely collected health data. MethodsThe ECHOES dataset is as a national level dataset combining national level surveillance, administrative, and healthcare data. Entity resolution and data linkages methods are used to create a cohort of individuals who have tested positive and negative for SARS-CoV-2 in England throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside information on a range of health outcomes including diagnosed clinical conditions and mortality, and risk factor information. ResultsThe dataset contains comprehensive COVID-19 testing data and demographic, socio economic and health related information for 44 million individuals, who tested for SARS-CoV-2 between March 2020 and April 2022, representing 15,720,286 individuals who tested positive and 42,351,016 individuals who tested negative. DiscussionWith the application of epidemiological and statistical methods, this dataset allows a range of clinical outcomes to be investigated, including pre-specified health conditions and mortality. Furthermore, understanding of potential determinants of health outcomes can be gained, including pre-existing health conditions, acute disease characteristics, SARS-CoV-2 vaccination status and genomic variant.