The support provided by the NIH through the Clinical Translational Science Awards (CTSA) initiative is having a significant impact on translational medicine. Implementation of CTSA goals has exposed many underlying informatics challenges and forced us to consider them with a depth of seriousness that probably would not have happened otherwise. Hence, the CTSA "movement" is a wonderful phenomenon (both as a concrete and conceptual one) which is motivating us to organize and analyze our ideas as they relate to achieving key goals associated with biomedical informatics.

In our last NSF event, which focused on emerging research areas in Biomedical Informatics, we did not spend significant time on CTSA related activities. I would like to make implementation of CTSA goals and related experiences a broad theme of this session.

Some of the key areas I would like you to consider are:

  1. Development challenges associated with clinical data warehouses for research, quality assessment, and educational objectives
  2. Data governance associated with provisioning of clinical/health data for research and educational applications
  3. Integration of clinical and health data across institutions (e.g., between two universities or between a university and stand-alone health service provider)
  4. Integration of clinical and health data with other biomedical resources/data (e.g., clinical data with genomics data)
  5. Data standards for clinical data warehouses or other data resources relevant to CTSA activities
  6. Research and educational applications of clinical data warehouses (e.g., Stanford's STRIDE system)
  7. Integration of images and other multimedia data with clinical data warehouses
  8. Educational opportunities created by the CTSA; how can the emphasis on translational medicine be translated to educational changes in health/med informatics programs?

The goal for the session is to learn about each other's work and experiences related to the above topics, share ideas, and converge on some key issues and research challenges that will be included in a report I am preparing for the NSF. The approximate format for the session will be the following:

Start date and time: February 9th, 9:00 am

  • Introduction: An overview of activities at UNC by a principal member of the CTSA project team at UNC.
  • Presentations: By each core participant, lasting about 10 minutes each and focusing on one or two topics selected from above.
  • List of important challenges: Based on items highlighted in the presentations, we will then create a small list of themes that we consider to be the most important challenges / issues related to CTSA implementation.
  • Elaborate on the challenges: We will then take up each of these themes and "flesh" them out further.
  • Resources: We will end the session by attempting to identify resources (e.g., potential sources of funding and support) and means (e.g., mechanisms to enhance collaborations across groups) to address the main challenges.

We will have a coffee break around 10:00 am and we will conclude our session at 12:15 pm.

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