A globally coordinated, health data-led research response to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.

Convened by Health Data Research UK, the national institute for health data in the UK, the International COVID-19 Data Alliance (ICODA) was an open and inclusive global collaboration of leading life science, philanthropic and research organisations that came together to harness the power of health data to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The ICODA programme ran from July 2020 until October 2022 and together with our partners and researchers, we sought to develop a trustworthy approach to overcome the challenges of accessing and harnessing the power of data.  You can see some of the excellent outputs of the programme in our driver projects and publications pages.

Our showcase webinar and our paper on data challenges for international health emergencies, published in The Lancet Digital Health are key programme highlights.

COVID-19 remains the greatest health challenge for a generation. It called for a globally co-ordinated response that used all of the tools and technology available.

By uniting data, we aimed to enable discoveries that help treat and prevent COVID-19, as well as co-ordinate an effective global health data response to health challenges of the future.

ICODA convened and sought to accelerate the work already being undertaken globally, ensuring that health data was accessible in a trusted research environment, the ICODA Workbench.

Building on the ICODA programme, HDR UK convened the HDR Global programme which sought to assist with data science skills and enable trustworthy data access, re-use and analysis in regions, communities and disease areas, where evidence to tackle threats to public health is lacking