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.