Data Concierge
Our Data Concierge is here to connect investigators and researchers to the appropriate resources, irrespective of where in the University of Health System those resources are housed, making it much easier for researchers to find what they need.

Email Data Concierge

The Digital Research Platform (DRP)
The DRP is a collection of integrated computational tools managed by Research Informatics for conducting research. The DRP includes the following:

• Research Cloud
  At the center of the DRP is our research cloud. Our HIPAA-compliant, research cloud infrastructure includes centralized research data lakehouse, built on Databricks, to enable big data handling with Apache Spark and robust performance with Delta Lake. High performance computing, including GPU clusters is available from Microsoft Azure and can be scaled on demand, and machine learning lifecycle management is available from MLFlow.

• Research Data Lakehouse (RDL)
  An integral part of the Research Cloud is the RDL. The RDL integrates a large amount of data from several sources, enabled by various data use or business associate agreements we maintain with the relevant organizations. This includes electronic medical records from about 2 million patients seen at the University of Kansas Health System; data from medical devices such as EKG, MRI, CT, or X-ray; genetic testing for reference and internal labs, meta data from KUMC’s biospecimen repository, mortality data from the Social Security Death Master File, study participation data from KUMC’s clinical trial management system, study data as need from the REDCap system, and much more.

Data Collection and Participant Recruitment

HERON
The Healthcare Enterprise Repository for Ontological Narration (HERON) is an integrated clinical data repository with approximately 2 million patient electronic medical records (EMR) as well as records of patients who agree to be contacted for research, socioeconomic data, death data, and clinical notes, which is a valuable resource for clinical and translational research. KUMC researchers can build a study cohort with HERON using the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) software and request de-identified and identified data.

REDCap
REDCap is used by more than 700 institutions in over 60 countries and has become a dominant tool for electronic data capture for research studies at most academic medical centers in the United States.

GeoMarker
A privacy protecting geolocation service that can provide latitude and longitude for any address with accessing external sources, drive times to the Health System, and some socioeconomic data.

Automated Cohort Discovery and Prescreening through Reporting Workbench
Automated cohort discovery/prescreening through Reporting workbench is built directly in EPIC/O2. Research Informatics can create reports that identify patients who meet inclusion/exclusion criteria and that can be refreshed by study coordinators. Studies with HIPAA waivers can use this to retrieve patient contact information for recruitment.

Our Practice Advisory (OPAs)
OPAs provide targeted, patient-specific clinical guidance on a wide variety of topics. OPAs scan the entire patient record and can display notifications to physicians based on many key pieces of clinical data, such as lab results, assessment data, current medications, diagnoses, and histories.  Research OPAs can alert a physician that the patient they are seeing may qualify for a study.

Greater Plains Collaborative
Greater Plains Collaborative (GPC) is a network of 12 leading medical centers in 9 states committed to a shared vision of improving healthcare delivery through ongoing learning, adoption of evidence - based practices, and active research dissemination. The GPC builds on strong research programs at our sites, existing community engagement and informatics infrastructures and data warehouses developed through the NIH Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) initiative at most of our sites, extensive expertise with commercial EHR systems and terminology standardization, and strong working relationships between investigators and healthcare system information technology departments. Our network brings together a diverse population with millions of patients across 1,550 miles covering 9 states.

National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C)
National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C) The N3C is a partnership among the NCATS-supported Clinical Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program hubs, the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), and NIGMS-supported Institutional Development Award Networks for Clinical and Translational Research (IDeA-CTR), with overall stewardship by NCATS. As a partner, KUMC is contributing COVID-19 clinical data to the N3C data enclave. KUMC researchers can request access to the N3C data enclave to conduct studies for answering critical COVID-19 related research questions.

Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR
The Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR (4CE) is an international consortium for EHR data-driven studies of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this effort is to inform doctors, epidemiologists, and the public about COVID-19 patients with data acquired through the health care process. 4CE is using a distributing learning framework where researchers post their queries through the coordinating center for participating sites to run the queries locally without raw EHR data leaving their institutions.

ResearchMatch
Is a nonprofit program funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It helps to connect people interested in research studies with researchers from top medical centers across the U.S. The Office of the Chief Research Informatics Officer can connect researchers to the appropriate liaison at our institution.

Data Management and Planning

LabArchives
LabArchives is our Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN). LabArchives is the leading ELN among Academic Medical Centers and is used by about 750,000 scientists. It provides an electronic data capture solution for research labs with built-in collaboration tools, protocol management, and more. It meets many stringent compliance standards, including HIPAA, GDPR, and NIST 800-171.

Data Management and Sharing Plans
Our Data Concierge offers assistance with preparing and reviewing Data Management Plans at no cost.

Data Analytics

Cerner Learning Health Network
The Learning Health network is a large deidentified data resource with electronic health record data from over 100 million patients combined from multiple institutions, including our own. Most of the data come from institutions on Cerner, but they have the capability to harmonize in Epic institutions as well. Research Informatics can work with researchers to curate datasets and perform analytics in the LHN environment. The LHN also provides opportunities for multi-site studies.

Epic Cosmos
Research Informatics provides access to Epic’s Cosmos database and data science tools with deidentified data from electronic health records for over 200 million patients from hospitals across the United States, including our own. Cosmos data provides a good representation of the US population when compared to the United States Census. Research Informatics provides staff who are certified to use the Cosmos data science tools to help researchers take advantage of this powerful dataset.

Green HERON
Green HERON is a highly protected health data analytic space where approved users can work with de-identified health information. Green HERON simplifies the effort of obtaining EMR data from HERON, while supporting external researchers. The analytics space offers a rich set of tools, services, and resources required by research. Within the protected environment, Green HERON users are provided the ability to select analytic tools such as R, SAS, and Python.

Slicer Dicer
SlicerDicer is a visual tool for exploring electronic health records at the University of Kansas Health System. It includes powerful data exploration abilities for clinical, access, and revenue subject areas. In SlicerDicer, users can investigate a hunch and then refine their searches on the fly. Clinical researchers can examine trends and develop hypotheses by quickly explore large quantities of data.

Additional Services

Clinical Informatics Services
Research Informatics provides consultation and build services within the Epic O2 electronic health record (EHR) to support research study administration, research data capture, and recruitment via real-time messaging through the MyChart patient portal, reports using Reporting Workbench, or point-of-care alerts.

For questions about any of our tools please contact Research Informatics.

Other Equipment and Instrumentation

Network
All computers at KUMC are connected to a 1 Gigabit per second local area network that provides more than 3.2 TB of network file storage. Networked file servers provide constant hardware backups of stored data through mirrored storage systems and daily tape backups are also performed. Weekly tape backups are stored off site for additional protection of research data. The network is managed by KUMC's Information Resources who provides installation, training, and maintenance on all information systems. The local area network is connected to a switched, 1 Gigabit Ethernet backbone that provides high speed Internet access through the KUMC Internet-2 communication network. Currently KUMC's Internet2 access is via the Kansas Research and Education Network (KanREN). KanREN supports Internet2 connectivity for all of its members via a 10Gbps link to the Great Plains Network (GPN).

Hardware
HERON: Medical Informatics has several servers that support the development, test and production instances of our Healthcare Enterprise Repository for Ontological Narration (HERON).

An analysis server hosting R Studio has four 6-core Intel Xeon X5650 2.67 GHz CPUs, 70GB of memory, 1.2TB of local hard disk storage and a Dual port Qlogic 8GB Fiber-channel HBA controller.

A HIPAA compliant Linux analysis server for clinical data analysis is a protected health data analytic space where approved users can work on de-identified clinical data. The server has 24-cores @1.2GHz with 768GB RAM, 6TB NVMe storage, 900GB SCSi storage, and 1.6TBSSD storage; it is loaded with a variety of analytic tools including R, RStudio, Python, Jupyter Notebook, SQL, SAS and STATA.

Identified and de-identified RESDAC claims data and other GPC sites’ EMR data are stored on separate HP ProLiant DL380 servers managed by KUMC Information Resources. Each of these servers has 6-core Intel Xeon E5-2643v3 3.4 GHz CPUs, 512GB of memory and 22.3TB of local storage.

Identified and de-identified HERON data is stored on a HP ProLiant DL560 Gen 8 server managed by KUMC Information Resources. The identified data server has four 6-core Intel Xeon E5-4617 2.90 GHz CPUs, 512 GB of memory, a 6.7 TB Fusion IO card, 839 GB of local hard disk storage, 1.8 TB of networked storage and a Dual port Qlogic 8GB Fiber-channel HBA controller. The de-identified data server has four 6-core Intel Xeon E5-4617 2.90 GHz CPUs, 768 GB of memory, a 4.5 TB Fusion IO card, 839 GB of local hard disk storage, and a Dual port Qlogic 8GB Fiber-channel HBA controller. HERON Application servers are virtualized SUSE Linux servers managed by Information Resources

Our development and production instances of REDCap at KUMC are hosted on virtualized SUSE Linux servers managed by Information Resources. These virtualized servers' storage, processors and RAM can be dynamically assigned by Information Resources in response to utilization. Additional storage can be allocated from the campus XioTek Storage Area Network.