You've Had COVID-19. Should You Still Get Vaccinated? A CDC-Epic Collaboration Provides the Latest Insight

CDC researchers studied data from Epic's Cosmos database to compare the efficacy of infection-induced and vaccination-induced immunity to COVID-19

VERONA, Wis., April 13, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- In a new Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), researchers from the CDC and Epic found that among people previously infected with SARS-CoV-2, vaccination offers the best protection against reinfections that result in hospitalizations. This finding is consistent with previous evidence that vaccination-induced immunity combined with infection-induced immunity provides better protection than infection-induced immunity alone. The new report presents an analysis of data from Epic's Cosmos database, a large electronic health record database that is broadly representative of the U.S. population.

"Working with the Cosmos platform meant that we could ask a question that really needs a large data set to address: 'If you've had COVID-19 in the past, can vaccines offer protection from the risk of being hospitalized with a reinfection?'" said Ian Plumb, medical epidemiologist at CDC. "We found that vaccines can protect you against hospitalization from reinfection, and that the highest level of protection was from a booster dose."

Cosmos allows researchers to study 138 million deidentified patient records that account for more than 4 billion healthcare encounters nationwide. Researchers and clinicians can leverage the depth, breadth, and representativeness of this data in a platform optimized for real-time queries, reducing the time it takes to answer many clinical questions from years to minutes.

"Cosmos has great potential to increase the speed of medical discovery," said Jackie Gerhart, MD, vice president of clinical informatics at Epic. "Our latest collaboration with the CDC is an excellent example of how experts, with so much representative data at their fingertips, can more quickly inform public health guidance and clinical decision-making."

This week's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report adds to a series of CDC-Epic collaborations, which includes previous examinations of COVID-19 breakthrough infections and COVID-19-related cases of myocarditis and MIS-C, as well as ongoing examinations of cancer screening patterns and antimicrobial stewardship.

Other research teams have used Cosmos data to generate findings published in peer-reviewed journals like Pediatrics, the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst, and Diabetes Care. Epic Research, a team created in 2020 to make insights from observational data readily available to public health officials, clinicians, and decision-makers, regularly publishes analyses of Cosmos data, including recent briefs on delayed cancer screenings, COVID-19 breakthrough cases, emergency room visits for gun violence, and pediatric eating disorders.

To learn more about Cosmos and Epic, visit https://cosmos.epic.com/ and www.epic.com/about

SOURCE Epic