The Board of Directors have approved the distribution of an invitation for INVENT-member collaboration.
Participation is voluntary and at your discretion. The message that follows is from the lead investigator, Dr. Geert-Jan Geersing; please correspond with him directly if you have any questions concerning the invitation.
Invitation for Collaboration
Dear colleagues,
Many of us are involved now in managing thrombosis risk in Covid-19 patients, directly via patient care, in academic work, or (for most of us) both. I would like to reach out via INVENT-VTE to seek contacts for an international project on risk-stratification of (clinically suspected) Covid-19 patients, while still ambulatory and managed as outpatients in general practice.
Let me shortly introduce myself. My name is Geert-Jan Geersing, I am an associate professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands (Julius Center for Health Sciences and Primary Care at the University Medical Center Utrecht). Clinically, I work as a family physician in an inner city hospital in Amsterdam (OLVG hospital). My research focusses on managing thrombosis (risk) in outpatients, in primary care.
My team is now working on a project to risk-stratify Covid-19 patients to identify risk groups at higher risk of developing thrombo-vascular complications later-on in their disease process. The explicit aim is to start risk stratification already while patients are still treated outside the hospital; it could well be that the window-of-opportunity to ‘act’ is there, either by closer monitoring, earlier referral to the hospital or perhaps even starting thromboprophylaxis while patients are still outside of the hospital. Currently there is no evidence to guide us.
The design to do this work would be to use routine healthcare databases that include both primary care data and hospital data (either directly, or via linkage). Target population would be clinically suspected Covid-19 (either only clinically suspected or confirmed by PCR). Outcomes are (obviously) thrombo-vascular complications within 90 days of symptom onset.
Our question and reason to reach out is: are you aware of similar projects in your university / networks, and/or are you aware of suitable databases that can be used for this question? Currently, we are in contact with Dutch databases, UK databases, and Canadian databases.
Feel free to ask me additional questions!
Warmest wishes,
Geert-Jan Geersing, M.D. Ph.D. General Practitioner
g.j.geersing@umcutrecht.nl
@gjgeersing (Twitter)
www.gjgeersing.nl
Original Invitation