The National Institutes of Health, a branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the primary federal agency for conducting and supporting medical research, has awarded three contracts for pilot projects to improve informatics support for researchers conducting small-to medium-sized clinical studies.

Officials say the projects will boost how researchers communicate and aid in the discovery of new treatments for diseases.
 
The two-year contracts, totalling about $4 million, were awarded to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, the University of Washington in Seattle  and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn.

The universities represent a collaboration of individuals that will receive NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA). The CTSA program, which is administered by the National Center for Research Resources, is designed to create a definable academic home for the discipline of clinical and translational science at institutions across the country.

"These projects, which will build on the existing strong informatics expertise at the institutions, will promote new ways ... to enable researchers to collaborate and communicate across the CTSA consortium and with other partners in their research," said NCRR Director Barbara M. Alving, MD. "The projects are one important part of a larger effort to achieve the potential of clinical and translational science and reduce the time it takes to develop new treatments for disease."

The Case Western Reserve University project will develop Physio-MIMI, an informatics infrastructure for collecting, managing and analyzing diverse data types across institutions. Researchers will be able to more effectively and efficiently collaborate in national studies that include many complex data sources and types, such as heart or brain monitoring data and genomic information.

A key component of the system will allow secure, safe and regulated transfer of information from clinical care systems and research databases.

The University of Washington project will develop a mechanism allowing researchers at three large, geographically distributed medical centers to easily access large shared data sets to assist in designing research studies and generating hypotheses.

This team will extend Harvard University's i2b2 software architecture to support cross-institution searches. This project will provide model policies and procedures to advance multi-institutional sharing of clinical data in support of research.

The Vanderbilt University project will extend the capabilities of the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) system. REDCap is a software toolset that provides research teams with an easy workflow to rapidly develop secure, Web-based applications for collecting, managing and appropriate sharing of clinical study data.

The project's enhancements will make the system useful to a significantly greater number of studies and facilitate national and international collaborations. REDCap currently supports approximately 300 studies across an international consortium of 31 institutions.