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Biomedical Informatics and Medical Education > Service and Practice > Research Informatics and IT

Research Informatics and IT

Dr. Sean Mooney, BIME core faculty and UW Medicine Chief Research Information Officer along with the Director of Research IT lead a research informatics and research IT core for all of UW Medicine. Many BIME faculty and students collaborate with this group on operational and research projects including Gang Luo, Meliha Yetisgen, and Peter Tarczy-Hornoch. This group is organizationally housed in UW Medicine Information Technology Services (ITS, clinical computing group) to leverage the computing, networking, security, data warehousing, analytics and electronic health record  (Cerner and Epic) resources of ITS. Research informatics/IT collaborates closely with the Department of BIME, UW Medicine ITS, our CTSA (ITHS, the Institute of Translational Health Sciences), the Health Sciences Library, the UW Medicine Office of Research and Graduate Education, the research IT groups at Seattle Children’s and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.  Key groups within research informatics/research IT include the following:

  • Support for clinical trials:
    • Technologies for innovative patient recruitment
    • Clinical Trials Management for the Cancer Consortium and the UW Enterprise
    • Electronic Data Capture of clinical study data
  • Access to the UW Medicine Health Record for Research
    • Cohort Discovery using De-identified EHR datasets
    • Data extraction with our technological window to our Enterprise Data Warehouse, Leaf
    • Honest broker consulting services for research disclosures of health record data under IRB
  • Management of universal consent data workflows in the medical record, the EDW, and the Pathology BioCore system
  • Research platforms for clinical data
    • Natural Language Processing of clinical text
    • Support for Data Science on health record data
    • Support for custom ETL and Common Data Model mapping
  • IT Support for Secure Clinical Research Environments
    • Server infrastructure for support of ITHS server environments
    • Support for Cloud Computing Environments under a BAA
  • Platform support and collaboration with Health Sciences Library and our CTSA (ITHS) on TRAIL (the Translational Research and Information Lab)
  • The Pacific Northwest Clinical Research Informatics Collaborative (founding partners UW, Seattle Children’s, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center)

Our CTSA was established over a decade ago. The Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) is dedicated to speeding science to the clinic for the benefit of patients and communities throughout Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho. ITHS offers resources to researchers that increase the speed at which scientific discoveries can be translated into treatments that improve health outcomes for patients and communities. The ITHS Education Program supports investigators and scholars through the development and maintenance of curriculum and career development education. The key partners in the ITHS are UW, Seattle Children’s, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.