Blogs

David Raths

The project is still in its formative stages. Published notes from a kickoff meeting for Vulcan held last fall describe its goals of helping the research community leverage FHIR for more effective acquisition, exchange and use of data for clinical research.

At the meeting Wayne Kubick, HL7’s chief technology officer, suggested several use cases for research:

• Feasibility, instigator and subject searches

Robert Grossman - Data Scientist at the University of Chicago, Director of the Open Commons Consortium

We Need Three Types of Large-Scale COVID-19 Testing

The importance of COVID-19 testing is now more than clear to everyone, but what may not be so obvious is what type of testing is required, what the tests tell us, and what we can do with the data.

Large scale, robust testing needs to answer three critical questions to inform an appropriate public health response:

Phil Bourne, PhD - Stephenson Dean of the School of Data Science, Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Virginia

These are unprecedented times and the School of Data Science (SDS) team–students, faculty and staff–have gone above and beyond in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I am heartfelt and extremely proud of every one of them.

Christopher P. Austin, MD, Director, NCATS

We believe that a centralized, open-access data portal, with oversight through a scientific committee, of a limited data set of COVID-19 clinical data would be a critical resource to help address questions related to COVID19.

Guest post by members of a large collaborative network of academic health sciences libraries

The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting public health crisis have had a profound impact, reshaping patient care, training, research, learning, and community engagement across academic medicine. Academic health sciences libraries are answering an urgent call to implement the virtual library as an extension of our embedded and integrated roles on campus.

Christopher Chute, MD, DrPH, Johns Hopkins University

Data is the foundation for all of modern science—from hypotheses to inference, conclusions, and reproducibility. Electronic health records (EHRs) have emerged as an important source for interventional, as well as observational, clinical research. The CTSA program aspires to forge synergy across its hubs by supporting federated research at scale, amplifying the precision and power of clinical analytics and discovery over a broad spectrum of clinical problems.