SACRAMENTO -- UC Davis has been named part of a pilot project supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is designed to improve informatics support for researchers conducting small- to medium-sized clinical studies.
The new project is part of a national effort to speed discoveries across the medical field by better connecting scientists with one another, as well as with patients and communities across the nation. These connections bring together innovative research teams and the power of shared resources, all of which multiply opportunities to improve human health.
"This is an excellent opportunity for the Clinical and Translational Science Center and other UC Davis resources to coordinate with our West Coast Consortium partners and further accelerate the use of cutting-edge informatics resources for investigators," said Lars Berglund, director of the center in Sacramento and a professor of medicine. "We are extremely pleased to help lead the way in developing tools that will enhance the quality of clinical research at the national level."
Informatics -- the science of information, information processing and the design of information systems -- is increasingly playing a key role in medicine and health care. It includes systems that store, process and facilitate the exchange of information, which is crucial given the complexity of data and information within the medical world.
Through its Clinical and Translational Science (CTSC) Center, UC Davis is part of a University of Washington project to develop a mechanism to allow researchers at three separate medical centers to easily access large shared data sets to assist in designing research studies and generating hypotheses.
Joining with the Washington investigators and scientists from UC San Francisco, UC Davis experts will work together to enhance Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside software (also know as "i2b2" architecture) to support cross-institution research efforts. The project will provide model policies and procedures for creating a shared network of clinical research data among numerous institutions and harnessing the talents of many experts to focus on a particular problem or condition.
The project is one of three being administered by the National Center for Research Resources and designed for institutions that receive NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards. Encouraging institutional collaboration is seen as a way to enable the more efficient translation of basic biomedical research into treatments and strategies to improve human health.
The program is seen as an important way to build on the existing informatics expertise at different institutions and promote new ways for researchers to collaborate and communicate with each other in their research. It is also part of a larger, national effort to reduce the time it takes to develop new treatments for disease.
"This project is an important way to rapidly accelerate and expand the collaborative research potential among distant institutions," said Kent Anderson, project director at UC Davis and assistant director for biomedical informatics at the CTSC. "This is really scientific networking at its finest."
The UC Davis team will play an important role in the overall project by acting as evaluators to ensure that the developing technology integrates with the needs of a wide variety of potential i2b2 users at each institution.
"The UC Davis evaluation team will collect usability assessments from investigators at all of the sites throughout a two-year period," noted Julie Rainwater, principal investigator on the project. "Because this project can reduce the typical clinical barriers to cross-institutional discovery, we expect it to especially benefit researchers working on small to medium-sized studies -- efforts that typically don't include so much scientific input or academic support."
Full project descriptions provided by each lead institution, as well as a list of project partner institutions, are available at www.ncrr.nih.gov/ctsa/informatics.
UC Davis Clinical and Translational Science Center
UC Davis was among the first 12 institutions in the United States, and one of only three in the western region, which made up the initial part of an NIH initiative in 2006 to advance the nation's clinical and translational research efforts. The sites are considered 'discovery engines' for improving medical care by applying scientific advances to real world practice. The Sacramento-based center is the academic home for multidisciplinary medical research among UC Davis' many institutional and community partners.
Project background
The funding for the pilot informatics projects is provided by the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research/Common Fund. Software resulting from the projects will be freely available to biomedical researchers, educators and institutions in the nonprofit sector.
NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards currently support 38 medical research institutions sharing a common vision to reduce the time it takes for laboratory discoveries to become treatments for patients, engage communities in clinical research efforts and train the next generation of clinical researchers. For more information, visit www.ctsaweb.org.