Clinical Research Informatics Program

Efficient data collection, management and analyses in health care are essential to improve patient outcomes, support evidence-based decision making and inform robust clinical and translational research. We unify and streamline data collection to ensure the efficient tracking of patient outcomes, participation in clinical trials and collaboration among other researchers in the institution as well as external collaborators. We also aid with our researchers’ compliance with regulatory requirements to increase the transparency of our data collection and analytic methods.

Key functions and responsibilities of the program include the following:

• Data Integration: Help integrate and organize existing clinical databases; key data components common to all disease sites are integrated to create a central repository for patient and provider level data used for research
• Data Extraction: Support automated data extraction from our enterprise data warehouses and other departmental and institutional databases
• Enhanced Data Entry: Standardize data elements and structure clinical variables through the Department of Surgical Oncology Automated Cancer Data Initiative (ACDI); the goal is to automate the collection of key structured oncologic variables
• Data Analytics: Assist researchers in data wrangling and big data analyses (machine learning, natural language processing) for research proposals and grants