When Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus-2 (SARS-CoV-2) spread across the world in 2020, it had major and long-lasting effects. Globally, the virus caused an estimated 20 million deaths, cost $16 trillion USD, and pushed 130 million people into poverty. Many research and healthcare systems struggled to respond quickly, which led to critical delays, wasted resources, and unnecessary harm.
In Canada, research progress was slowed because provinces could not easily combine important information like vaccination records, test results, and viral strain data. This made it harder to understand what was happening in real time and to evaluate how well different treatments across pre-hospital, emergency department, and hospital settings were working, as well as the broader impacts of pandemic policies on health equity. For many Canadians, urgently needed research came too late.
To respond to these challenges, emergency doctors across Canada created a Canada-wide secure research database of hospital visit information for patients tested for SARS-CoV-2 called the Canadian COVID-19 Emergency Department Rapid Response Network (CCEDRRN). This network built a national dataset capturing information from the care delivered in ambulances, emergency departments, and hospitals, to support timely and impactful research. This work produced 24 peer-reviewed publications, 37 protocols, six government-commissioned reports, and won national awards. Even before the pandemic ended, this platform was used to study the impact of British Columbia’s 2021 extreme heat event.
The successful work of CCEDRRN formed the basis of the current research network, the Canadian Emergency Department Research Network (CEDRN). CEDRN is uniquely positioned to build a national dataset on respiratory illnesses that have the potential to cause future pandemics. This will help Canada better understand patient outcomes, health system performance, and the effectiveness of testing and vaccines. In June 2025, this work was recognized through the award of the CIHR Centre for Research on Pandemic Preparedness and Health Emergencies (CRPPHE) Grant.
Our goals
- Implement a plan
Develop and implement a plan to help Canada be better prepared for future pandemics by building a simple, shared way to collect information on serious respiratory infections, and by strengthening partnerships with other teams and organizations. - Build a complete national dataset on patient care
This dataset will capture the patient journey from arrival in the emergency department to hospital discharge, including in both rural and urban sites. We aim to link this hospital visit information to vaccination records, virus strain data, and patients’ long-term health outcomes. - Strengthen Canada’s ability to do fast, collaborative, and patient-focused research during pandemic and health emergencies
We will expand training, mentorship and collaborations, guided by an open science framework so that our work is transparent and widely accessible. - Expand national and international collaborations
We want to enable diverse groups to participate and reduce research duplication. Some of our international collaborators include organizations such as the International Severe Acute Respiratory Emergency Infections Consortium (ISARIC) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Our approach
We are building on the partnerships and work started by CCEDRRN during the COVID-19 pandemic. This includes refining their pandemic data dictionary, aligning our data systems with hospitals, and testing automated data extraction and upload processes. This groundwork will help us launch studies quickly if a new virus appears.
We are building a Canada-wide secure research database of hospital visit information (called a registry) to collect information from people who come to the emergency department and are tested for respiratory illnesses, including flu, COVID-19, or respiratory syncytial virus. In the event of a pandemic caused by a new virus, we will add patients tested for this virus to the registry too. This registry will help doctors and researchers quickly learn how these illnesses are affecting people, how treatments are working, and how we can better prepare for future health emergencies.
Read our research registry protocol
Researchers, healthcare professionals, and organizations may find it helpful to review our research protocol, which outlines how the registry operates and can help inform potential sub-studies using registry data or support their own research efforts.
The protocol is available for download: CEDRN Pandemic and Health Emergencies Preparedness Registry Protocol
Explore our data
Researchers, healthcare professionals and organizations can learn more about the structure and scope of the Pandemic Preparedness Registry data, including:
- Core demographic, clinical, and encounter-level variables
- Data sources and collection methods
This information helps teams assess feasibility, plan analyses, align study designs with available registry fields, and request data from the registry.
A complete Data Dictionary is available for download: CEDRN Pandemic and Health Emergencies Preparedness Data Dictionary
How your information is included
This research registry uses routinely collected health information from emergency department visits. As it is not possible to contact every patient during a busy emergency visit, people who meet the inclusion criteria will have information about that visit added to the registry without being asked for consent at the time of care.
Only information that is already collected as part of your routine care is included. No additional tests or procedures are done for research purposes.
Withdraw from this research registry
If you meet the criteria for inclusion in this research registry but would prefer not to have your data included, please contact the Research Coordinator, Vi Ho at vi.ho@ubc.ca.