In June 2020, under the supervision of the REDCap Brazil team, the construction of the first institutional database for HCFMUSP research was initiated, with detailed records on the thousands of hospitalizations that occurred in HCFMUSP by COVID-19 that year. This initiative was driven by the contribution of information automatically extracted from electronic medical records by NETI-HCFMUSP, and by the cooperation of some research groups that agreed to share the data captured specifically for their studies, including researchers from the Cardiopneumology Department (with data from patients admitted to intensive care units), from the Clinical Emergencies Discipline (with data from patients who were in the emergency care units of HCFMUSP), and later from the Geriatrics Discipline of the Clinical Medicine Department of FMUSP (with data from elderly patients).

By the end of 2021, the institutional database was consolidated with more than 3500 adults with a confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19 and more than 300 variables, with the addition of case validation and exclusion processes by the Epidemiological Surveillance Center of HCFMUSP (NUVE); laboratory test results from the initial moment of hospitalization organized by the INOVA-HC team; and manual complementation of data from more than 2000 medical records by a task force of young researchers. In parallel and using the same principles, a database with data from more than 100 children and adolescents admitted to HCFMUSP by COVID-19 was constituted by researchers from the Children's Institute.

Through its wide dissemination and successive calls to research groups, such institutional databases have been used in several studies, with access authorized/supervised by the Steering Committee COVID-19 and effected by NETI-HCFMUSP.

The adult hospitalization database now contains information on more than 5000 hospitalizations per COVID-19 (including cases from 2021). In addition, the first wave of data (hospitalizations from March to September 2020) was shared with the COVID-FAPESP Data Sharing Brazil repository, for open access by research groups outside the FMUSP-HC System. It is also noteworthy that the database of adult hospitalizations is fully integrated with the data from the cohort of patients surviving hospitalizations that are part of the multidisciplinary follow-up assessments after discharge, and with the COVID-19 Biobank.

The team responsible for the technical-administrative management of this work front includes today representatives of the researchers who have been directly involved in studies with COVID-19 inpatients (Julio Flávio Meirelles Marchini e Heraldo Possolo de Souza) and post-doctoral fellow Ana Paula Ritto, who works full time on the strategic and executive management of the institutional initiatives described here, in constant communication with the management team of INOVA-HC, which funds her post-doc fellowship and supervised by the COVID-19 Steering Committee.

All ethical and data security principles have been applied following current standards of data protection and confidentiality. No identification of patients' personal information is made available. No individually identifiable data is shared with the researchers (i.e., data is "anonymized"). Researchers sign a legal agreement not to make any attempt to identify participants. Research projects applying for access to the HCFMUSP institutional databases must be approved in advance by the Ethics Committee of the institution to which the researcher is affiliated.

The sharing of data and samples for additional research studies is conditional on the strict need for confidentiality of individual participants’ data and samples. Access to our institutional data and samples requires agreement from the researcher in assuming their ethical and legal responsibility. Individually identifiable data is never released.