University of California, Davis: October 2009
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UC Davis Health CIO Mike Minear is among the experts who are repurposing clinical data to meet the needs of practitioners, investigators and patients. UC Davis: Building an IT Foundation for Health Care Research Accelerating the pace of turning basic research breakthroughs into medical practice does not mean that scientists and clinicians simply work more closely together. At the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), Health System, it also means breaking down the barriers between health system operations and researchers. “The CTSA has provided UC Davis with the support to significantly change the culture of the institution and develop partnerships and collaborations that would not have otherwise existed,” said Lars Berglund, M.D., Ph.D., associate dean for research and director of the Clinical and Translational Science Center (CTSC) at UC Davis. “Developing secure systems that allow sharing of health data will advance research and improve all areas of health care, from reducing health disparities to ensuring new treatments reach the patients who need them.” Leaders in the field of information technology (IT) say designing and deploying IT for the future is critical to delivering software that truly meets the needs of clinicians, investigators, and patients. “Software was typically designed for a niche function within the clinical care environment or for a single research study,” said Mike Minear, chief information officer at the health system. “It was typically not designed for a secondary use, which severely limited its value to research and outcomes.” The IT staff and CTSC clinicians and researchers are making secondary use of clinical data a reality. The next generation of software will better collect data for disease registries, outcome and clinical effectiveness studies, clinical trials, and other types of health research. Minear and his 350-person IT team have been working to ensure software applications are well integrated with the research mission. For example, the university’s electronic medical record (EMR) system contains more than five years’ worth of patient records and supports a variety of clinical care functions. One recent project created a way to extract and de-identify clinical data from the EMR system and load it into the NIH-funded open-source software known as i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside). UC Davis is one of a handful of academic medical centers that have launched this software, which enables researchers to securely access and query real clinical data and mine it for potential research cohorts. “The needs of researchers can sometimes get lost at a large academic medical center,” said Kent Anderson, CTSC biomedical informatics team manager. “That doesn’t happen here. We are embraced by the institution and are ready to fully leverage that data for research.” By providing a highly effective environment for IT staff to learn and partner with researchers, the CTSC has been a catalyst for ensuring research requirements are incorporated into the design of new software. This integrated and collaborative approach overcomes traditional academic barriers, improving research, and bringing the latest health care advances to patients everywhere. |