The COVID-19 pandemic has represented a major cause of morbidity/mortality worldwide, overstressing health systems. Multiple myeloma (MM) patients show an increased risk for infections and they are expected to be particularly vulnerable to SARS-CoV-2 infection. Here we have obtained a comprehensive picture of the impact of COVID-19 in MM patients on a local and a global scale using a federated data research network (TriNetX) that provided access to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) from Health Care Organizations (HCO) all over the world. Through propensity score matched analyses we found that the number of new diagnoses of MM was reduced in 2020 compared to 2019 (RR 0.86, 95%CI 0.76–0.96) and the survival of newly diagnosed MM cases decreased similarly (HR 0.61, 0.38–0.81). MM patients showed higher risk of SARS-CoV-2 infection (RR 2.09, 1.58–2.76) and a higher excess mortality in 2020 (difference in excess mortality 9%, 4.4–13.2) than non-MM patients. By interrogating large EMR datasets from HCO in Europe and globally, we confirmed that MM patients have been more severely impacted by COVID-19 pandemic than non-MM patients. This study highlights the necessity of extending preventive measures worlwide to protect vulnerable patients from SARS-CoV-2 infection by promoting social distancing and an intensive vaccination strategies.

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Reuse of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) for specific diseases such as COVID-19 requires data to be recorded and persisted according to international standards. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hospital Universitario 12 de Octubre (H12O) evolved its EHRs: it identified, modeled and standardized the concepts related to this new disease in an agile, flexible and staged way. Thus, data from more than 200,000 COVID-19 cases were extracted, transformed, and loaded into an i2b2 repository. This effort allowed H12O to share data with worldwide networks such as the TriNetX platform and the 4CE Consortium.

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