Accomplishments

To date, our Clinical and Research Data Warehouse (CRDW) stores comprehensive health data of more than 600,000 UC Irvine patients collected from over 7 million ambulatory care encounters, emergency visits, or hospitalized stays. As of May 2018, the CBMI Honest Broker team has fulfilled over 1,000 research data requests using the CRDW platform, contributing to significant clinical and translational efforts such as NIH’s All of Us Research Program.

Using Freezerworks (Dataworks Development, Inc., Mountlake Terrace, WA), we created a virtual biobank that integrates information from multiple biorepositories to provide researchers one-stop, easy access to the metadata of all biospecimens stored at UC Irvine. These biospecimens are acquired for both clinical purposes (e.g., cancer pathology) as well as for research, such as the Breast and Other Cancers in the California Teacher’s Cohort and the ATHENA Breast Health Network, two UC Irvine-led large cohort studies that have collectively collected cancer and related tissues and body fluids from more than 300,000 individuals.

CBMI led the implementation of the i2b2/SHRINE-based UC Research Exchange (UCReX) network to enable cohort discovery across the 5 UC medical campuses. Since its debut in September 2013, UCReX has served more than 11,000 queries, providing research access to the health data of over 15 million patients. It has played an indispensable role in the conception, design, and conduct of numerous multisite studies within and beyond the UC. For example, the cross-institutional data querying capability enabled by UCReX allowed UC obstetrics researchers to participate in COMPARE-UF (Comparing Options for Management: Patient-Centered Results for Uterine Fibroids), a $20 million PCORI/AHRQ award.

The research work being conducted at the CBMI has started to make an impact in the biomedical informatics research community. In 2017 alone, we published over 20 research papers in Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) and AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings. These papers covered a variety of topics, including: human–computer interaction, medical word sense disambiguation, and computational social media analyses.

Our two-year Clinical Informatics Fellowship program received ACGME accreditation in 2017, making UC Irvine one of the 27 institutions that offer clinical informatics fellowship training. CBMI provides research seminars and research rotation opportunities for the fellows.

Since 2011, our undergraduate minor program in health informatics has graduated nearly 500 students, who may seek life-long careers in biomedical informatics and become leaders of the field.