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Inspired by data warehousing: A new platform integrates disparate information systems
Academic medical centers continuously strive to enhance patient care. One of the major mechanisms to improve patient health outcomes is through translational research – bringing research breakthroughs from the lab to patients via clinical trials. Making clinical trials more efficient, and ultimately more successful, would significantly advance patient care. However, fragmentation of the relevant data necessary to implement improvements to translational science is a significant barrier.
While some bioinformatic tools have attempted to address this problem, they often lacked the ability to assess the efficiency of translational science. Researchers at the South Carolina Clinical & Translational Research (SCTR) Institute, a Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) hub with an academic home at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), have developed a novel bioinformatic tool called RINS, the Research Integrated Network of Systems, that can be used to evaluate whether improvements to the clinical trial process are making a difference. Their results, published online on March 17 in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, showed that RINS can integrate data about clinical studies across disparate systems and provide metrics about MUSC’s clinical trial efficiency and effectiveness.