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Center for Clinical Research Informatics (CCRI)

The Center for Clinical Research Informatics (CCRI) is in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pittsburgh. CCRI is directed by Shyam Visweswaran, MD, PhD. The mission of CCRI is to do innovative research and healthcare delivery that is enabled by clinical, mobile health, molecular and research data. The CCRI is focused on:

  • developing a research data warehouse called Neptune
  • developing ontologies, terminologies and data characterization
  • doing data management for precision medicine
  • developing a learning Electronic Medical Record (LEMR) system
  • personalized modeling for precision medicine

The Learning Health System

The goal of a Learning Health System (LHS) is to deliver the best care every time, and to learn and improve with each care experience. A LHS has two arms: 1) an afferent (blue) arm that is focused on assembling data from various sources including electronic medical records (EMR) systems, mobile health (mHealth) applications and research studies into an integrated research data repository, and 2) an efferent (red) arm that is focused on returning results and findings obtained from analyses of the data repository to inform clinical decision support and patient decision support systems.

The CCRI is the home of the Biomedical Informatics Core of the University of Pittsburgh Clinical and Translational Science Institute. The CCRI is an integral component of several national research networks that include: 1) the Accrual to Clinical Trials (ACT) network that is funded by the National Clinical and Translational Science Award (NCATS), 2) the PaTH network (University of Pittsburgh, Penn State, Temple University and John Hopkins University) that is funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), 3) the National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is a virtual biospecimen registry designed to support and facilitate research that in mesothelioma, and 4) the All of Us Research Program that is a landmark longitudinal research effort that aims to engage 1 million or more U.S. participants to revolutionize how disease is prevented and treated based on individual differences in lifestyle, environment and genetics.

News

2016 August The National Mesothelioma Virtual Bank (NMVB) is a virtual biospecimen registry designed to support and facilitate research in mesothelioma. It is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

2016 July The Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI) at the University of Pittsburgh is funded by a Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA). The goal of the Biomedical Informatics Core is to establish an i2b2-based data repository; and develop and deploy user-friendly, web-based informatics tools such as a Cohort Discovery Tool, a Computable Phenotype Library, and a Data Transfer Tool.

2016 July The University of Pittsburgh is funded as one of the Healthcare Provider Organizations for the national All of Us Research Program, which is a historic effort to gather data from 1 million people living in the United States. The goal of the program is to revolutionize how disease is prevented and treated based on individual differences in lifestyle, environment and genetics. The University of Pittsburgh program, called the All of Us Pennsylvania Research Program, will enroll 120,000 participants. See the University Times and the press release by the University of Pittsburgh.

2015 September NLM R01 funded for Development and evaluation of a learning electronic medical record system. Electronic medical records (EMRs) are capturing increasing amounts of patient data that can be leveraged by machine learning methods for computerized clinical decision support. This project focuses on developing a learning EMR system that uses machine learning to provide decision support using the right data, at the right time.