Boston Children's Hospital has joined the TriNetX global health research network to enhance its efforts to bring a more data-driven approach to clinical research.

A trend in healthcare is for organizations to gain access to a wider pool of patient data in an effort to speed the clinical study start-up process and identification of patients for clinical trials. Boston Children's Hospital went live on the TriNetX network on Feb. 1.

[Also: Boston Children's builds dashboard to better manage patient capacity and beds]

"Infusing a data-driven approach into the conversation between research institutions and industry provides great efficiencies, but most importantly, it gives our patients the opportunity to potentially participate in clinical trials they otherwise wouldn't be aware of," said Piotr Sliz, chief research information officer at Boston Children's.

"Being part of the TriNetX network allows us to collaborate around the globe with other researchers at biopharmaceutical companies who are working on new therapies that our patients need," he added.

TriNetX is a network that enables healthcare organizations, biopharmaceutical companies and contract research organizations to collaborate, enhance trial design, accelerate patient identification for recruitment, and conduct in-depth research through the sharing of clinical, oncology and genomic data mapped to a common data model.

Network members use TriNetX's cloud-based, health research platform to analyze patient populations and perform "what-if" analyses in real time. As members, healthcare organizations receive hardware and software that are configured within the organization's IT infrastructure and often builds on existing data resources such as i2b2 and Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership.

Researchers then have access to the institution's de-identified patient data through an interface and a growing number of visualization and analysis capabilities. Biopharmaceutical companies and CROs are presented with aggregate views, but each data point in the TriNetX network can be traced to healthcare organizations who have the ability to identify individual patients, allowing clinical researchers to develop virtual patient cohorts that can then be re-identified for potential recruitment into a clinical trial.

"TriNetX provides us with a responsive, modern interface that provides sophisticated visualizations to present our internal data to investigators at Boston Children's," said Sliz. "It is also beneficial that TriNetX is involved with several i2b2 research data warehouse projects in our community here in Boston."

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com