There is a power in unity you can’t achieve yourself.

With COVID-19 now a familiar part of everyday life, it’s hard to remember a time when the virus was unheard of. A time when it hadn’t yet been named, let alone identified as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation.

ICUs around the world were seeing patients presenting with symptoms that wouldn’t respond to traditional treatments for influenza, leaving healthcare professional perplexed.

As president of the Asia Pacific Chapter of the Extracorporeal Life Support Organisation (APELSO), Professor John Fraser, and colleagues Associate Professor Gianluigi Li Bassi and Dr Jacky Suen from the Critical Care Research Group, were receiving frantic calls and WhatsApp messages pleading for advice on how to treat the virus. They understood the need to support their colleagues at a time of great uncertainly and rapidly established the COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium.

The study protocol was designed using their knowledge, not of this strange new disease, but of their extensive knowledge as clinicians and scientists. It was intended to systematically capture, store, analyse, and safely and securely share information collected from sites around the world.

The trio understood that it was not only the need to understand COVID-19 that bought together this new community, but it was also the need to be heard. To share stories and to feel just a little less alone. Weekly drop-in sessions soon attended by hundreds of clinicians worldwide provided a space where, in the face of the great unknown, they could at least listen to how everyone around the world was fairing and learn more about the virus and the experience of those treating it.

The anecdotes shared on these calls was not only supportive, but in the absence of textbooks and research papers, they quickly became one of the only sources clinicians could turn to for COVID-19 information.

Two years and 250,000 hours of data entry later, the COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium has created the world’s most in-depth database of COVID-19 ICU patient information. The COVID Critical database holds detailed information of every aspect of ICU admission and care from close to 20,000 cases of COVID-19. The study is analysing all aspects of a patient’s ICU journey including brain function, and cardiac and kidney health.

The incredibly detailed, deidentified data helps clinicians determine treatment pathways for COVID-19 patients, however the greatest challenge was in being able to deliver the information safely and securely to where it would have an immediate impact. With the initial financial backing of The Common Good, the COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium sought investors to help build an app to place the life-saving data into the hands of doctors and nurses at patient bedsides.

In the face of the pandemic ravaging the world, COVID Critical had a clear vision: remove the barriers to understand this new disease and the time constraints of developing and publishing manuscripts. COVID Critical sought to revolutionise the way data can be captured and shared. With the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us, the COVID Critical has set a precedent on how to quickly establish a global research network, and safely store and disseminate an extraordinary amount of data, ultimately achieving a strength in unity not possible by working alone.

COVID Critical has now attracted the international attention from organisations including World Health Organization, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Andrew ‘Twiggy’ Forrest’s Minderoo, with the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) calling the project a ‘quantum change’ to data collection methodology that is sure to have a lasting impact for this and other medical crises.

The COVID-19 Critical Care Consortium wishes to thank The Common Good and its donors for their visionary and continued support for the project. Without you, this globally humanitarian effort would not have been possible.