In August 2020, PhenX received additional funding from the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to establish recommended collections of measurement protocols to support research on COVID-19. As a result of this project, six Specialty Collections of protocols were selected by a crowdsourcing method:
- Behaviors and Risks
- History, Treatment and Outcome
- Information Resources
- Psychosocial and Mental Health
- Demographics, Ethnicity and Race
- Socioeconomic
The COVID-19 Specialty Collections were added to the Toolkit in October 2020; they provide a common currency for people doing COVID-19 research. Use of these protocols will help researchers better understand the symptoms and treatments of COVID-19 diagnosis as well as the socioeconomic and mental health effects due to COVID-19. The COVID-19 Collections were established using the results of crowdsourcing and were approved by the PhenX Steering Committee.