The National Institute on Aging has awarded a $1.4 million grant to a research team based at Brown University and Hebrew SeniorLife to partner with Walgreens to add customer data to a massive monitoring system of the long-term safety and efficacy of COVID-19 vaccination for Medicare beneficiaries.
The tracking system, established by the same team of researchers in February, was already the first big data effort to combine vaccination and pharmacy records with Medicare claims. Adding data from 13.2 million Walgreens customers to the information from more than 13 million CVS customers will effectively double the size of the securely monitored data pool.
The larger the population, the better, said project leader Vince Mor, a professor of health services, policy and practice at Brown’s School of Public Health.
The new two-year project in partnership with Walgreens is the eighth grant supplement to a $53.4 million grant awarded to Brown and Hebrew SeniorLife in 2019 — one that is funding a project called the IMPACT Collaboratory, a nationwide effort to improve health care and quality of life for people living with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias, as well as their caregivers.