[ Posted by Isaac Kohane on 2008-06-05 at 13:11 ]
In the review of the planning grant for the Harvard University Clinical and Translational Science award, one reviewer made a pointed, if humorous, comment. It would be, s/he noted, innovative if Harvard would "merely" learn to work with itself. This (lightly) paraphrased critique outlined the challenge for the informatics component of the Harvard CTSA application: in addition to four General Clinical Research Centers (GCRC's) at four Harvard-affiliated hospitals (Brigham and Women's Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital and Children's Hospital, Boston) there are a multiplicity of research programs, resources and thousands of investigations relevant to translational research in the life sciences across the University. Fortunately, the informatics research community and the IT leadership across the hospitals and medical school had already developed productive collaborations which allowed us to serve as an important part of the collaborative glue across our institutions. Moreover, we already had passed the internal test of "eating our own dogfood" by adopting several NIH-funded technologies we had developed. This included a toolkit (call the "Hive") that enables academic health centers to instrument the healthcare system to conduct discovery research as an informational by product of healthcare delivery that was developed from our i2b2 National Center for Biomedical Computing and which is in the process of being adopted or evaluated by many previous CTSA awardees. It also includes the Virtual Specimen Locator which was one of the implementations of the Shared Pathology Informatics Network that the NCI had funded. With the technical and sociological learning of these projects under our belt we were able to propose the following:
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