National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, Md.) will provide an estimated $4 million for three collaborative pilot projects in Ohio, Tennessee and Washington designed to improve informatics support for researchers conducting small- to medium-sized clinical studies, it says. Led by the National Center for Research Resources, part of the NIH, the projects are planned to aid researchers nationwide by improving the way clinical trials data are collected, classified, stored, retrieved and disseminated.
Each of the projects represents collaboration among individuals at three or more institutions that receive NIH Clinical and Translational Science Awards. These partnerships are designed to enable translation of evolving information developed in basic biomedical research into treatments and strategies to improve human health.
The three new pilot projects will be led by:
- Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland, Ohio) to develop an informatics infrastructure for collecting, managing and analyzing diverse data across institutions more efficiently and effectively;
- University of Washington (Seattle) to create a way in which researchers at large, geographically diverse medical centers can easily access large shared data sets for research study design; and
- Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn.) to further expand a software system 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.
