Data Management and Mining
The Data storage, management, integration and mining services of CHIBI fully enable and/or contribute to the design, implementation, and management of a far-reaching strategic institutional vision that is jointly formulated and dynamically evolving by many participants including: the academic leadership, CHIBI, IT, the Research IT committee, the CTSI/CTSA, several researcher labs/units, the Biorepository facilities, the various high throughput molecular assay cores directors, and others.
This complex data management landscape covers all aspects of:
- Capture and storage of clinical and operational transactional data (e.g., EMR data)
- Data warehousing
- Data annotation
- Research protocol data management
- Biorepository specimen and meta data management
- High-throughput assay core data management and integration
- Advanced data analytics of stored data
Individual activities/projects to date include:
Use of the new Electronic Medical Record for research purposes:
Currently NYULMC is in the middle of an enterprise-wide implementation of EPIC for its inpatient and outpatient EMR/POE platform. CTSI researchers, CHIBI faculty and IT leadership are involved in implementing EPIC in a manner consistent with future research needs of stored data via inclusion of research-oriented data elements, harmonizing variables and vale encodings among specialties, etc.
Design, acquisition and deployment of a Federated Data Warehouse:
CHIBI recently completed two broad surveys of NYULMC research needs of a federated data warehouse. The CHIBI working group in charge of this process will issue recommendations about the FDW model to be pursued.
Clinical trial and other clinical research protocol-supporting data management systems and Database management services:
The NYU-HHC Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) and CHIBI recently announced the establishment of the Clinical and Research Informatics Data Management Unit led by Jim Robinson. This unit will act as an interface among investigators and the recently acquired eVelos system for management of clinical trials and other research protocol data. The unit also works with IT to ensure smooth implementation and interfacing of eVelos with legacy systems. In addition to hands on management, the Data Management Unit will provide educational services so that small projects can be executed directly by the investigators’ labs with minimal costs.
Biorepository specimen and data management and integration:
Currently NYULMC has several biorepositories specimens in which are being managed by the Freezerworks system. A recently-instituted working group will assess the future needs for biorepository specimen management and evaluate various open source and vendor provided systems.
Enterprise-wide data mining software and services:
The CHIBI data mining unit is part of the CTSA aims and aims to provide advanced data analytics services and software to researchers for use with the FDW and other automatically collected data.
Laboratory Information Management Systems for high-throughput assay core project management and integration with the EMR:
A working group organized by CHIBI has brought together all high-dimensionality core directors and critical personnel (including genomics, genetics, proteomics, flow cytometry, mi-RNA, and biorepositores) and created evaluation grids which are being used to evaluate vendor products. Recommendations from this group for acquiring an appropriate omics LIMS will be produced in November of 2009.
