The potential to build a comprehensive clinical data repository for HIV disease was greatly advanced by the work of CFAR investigators at the participating CNICS sites who had instituted point-of-care electronic medical record systems (EMRs) with the dual purpose of providing real-time clinical information to facilitate the delivery of HIV care and capturing standardized clinical data to support population-based HIV research.

The eight CNICS sites include: Case Western Reserve University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of California, San Francisco, the University of Washington, the University of California, San Diego, Fenway Community Health Center of Harvard University, University of North Carolina, and Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Although the JHU site is no longer CFAR-funded, we have continued to collaborate with the site and develop practices for including new sites into the CNICS project.

These eight sites currently comprise the CNICS Cohort, which is a large (n = 22,317) and diverse population of patients with regard to sex, racial, ethnic, age, risk factor for HIV transmission, and geographic distribution.