New i2b2 dashboard unveiled at CTSA Open House

Clinical research teams in the Buffalo Translational Consortium (BTC) have a powerful new tool for accessing the de-identified electronic health records (EHRs) of some 700,000 UBMD patients. (UBMD is the practice plan of UB’s Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.) Created by UB’s Institute for Healthcare Informatics (IHI), with the support of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), a new desktop dashboard connects investigators to the massive i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) database from the convenience of their own desktops.

The new data retrieval and processing system was unveiled by Jonathan Blaisure, IHI senior database architect, at the CTSA Open House held at the Clinical and Translational Research Center in December. Blaisure and colleagues -- including Daniel Rodman, an i2b2 programmer affiliated with the CTSA via the UB Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Development -- custom-designed the dashboard and its capabilities based on CTSA priorities. The IHI team is headed up by Executive Director Peter Winkelstein, MD, MBA, professor of clinical pediatrics and chief medical informatics officer for UBMD and Kaleida Health.

Investigators throughout the BTC are now able to directly identify cohorts for clinical trials and other research projects. Demographics, providers, diagnoses, medications, lab results and procedures, among other data points, are now available in de-identified form, allowing investigators to easily add inclusionary and exclusionary search criteria in order to assess the feasibility of proposed clinical trials in the Buffalo Niagara region. With IRB approval, investigative teams will then be able to use those results to begin patient recruitment.

The project supports the CTSA’s goal of establishing a “translational science pipeline” to enhance the BTC’s ability to integrate multiple types of data and share results more effectively between researchers, and then translate the results of successful research more rapidly into practice. Standardizing data storage and retrieval methods makes it easier for investigators to collaborate with one another and disseminate best practices from research results, and it makes meta-analyses and programmatic research much easier and faster.

UB’S IHI is a secure, HIPAA-compliant academic data center that opened in 2012. Its servers in the Center for Computational Research (CCR) provide a secure environment where health care data are stored, aggregated and analyzed. All translational research pipeline data are housed on secure IHI servers in the CCR.

To register for access to the new i2b2 dashboard, go to the Institute for Healthcare Informatics home page, click on the request access link at the top of the page and fill out the form. IHI personnel will provide log-in credentials.