Facilities and Resources

The Division of Medical Informatics (MI) is located on the 3rd floor of the Student Center on the KUMC campus. The division has over 3,000 square feet of office, cubicle, storage and conference room space. The Division of Medical Informatics provides capabilities and expertise in software engineering, data warehousing, data management, data integration, and administration of clinical trial and electronic data capture systems.

MI supports investigators and administrators at KUMC, affiliated organizations and external partners by providing informatics methods and analytics expertise including

1. data management and software development,
2. data integration and warehousing,
3. interventional informatics methods integrated with clinical workflow and patient experience and
4. business intelligence and analytical support for planning and decision making.

MI works closely with the University of Kansas Health System in making clinical, administrative, research, and payer data available for research purposes.

MI provides clinical integrated data repository and data warehousing, custom software focused on informatics systems and integration, data and knowledge representation and analytics, provides data governance and honest broker services for distributing data sets, and training and consultation with investigators and their teams seeking to advance clinical research and health system improvement. This ranges from hypotheses generation to data-driven clinical trial recruitment and supporting large multi-institutional observational studies.

Resources and Tools Supported

• HERON: The Healthcare Enterprise Repository for Ontological Narration (HERON) is an integrated clinical data repository with more than 2 million patient electronic medical records (EMR) as well as research participant registry, socioeconomic data, death data, and clinical notes, which is a valuable resource for clinical and translational research. KUMC researchers can build study cohort with HERON using the i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) software and request de-identified and identified data.
• 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 with approved NetIDs. 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.
• ACT SHRINE is a national data query tool enabling Frontiers researchers to query over 125 million patient records across institutions in the Accrual to Clinical Trials (ACT) Network. Using ACT SHRINE, researchers can explore and validate patient cohorts and identify potential collaborators for investigator-initiated single- and multi-site clinical trials.
• 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. REDCap is now connected to the KUMC CAS System (Central Authentication System) to allow users to bypass multiple logins.
• Clinical 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 reports using Reporting Workbench or point-of-care alerts.

Equipment and Instrumentation

• Computers
  • All computers in the Center 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 Technology 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) and KUMC is connected to KanREN via a 1 Gigabit per second connection. This high-speed network provides each workstation with access to the World Wide Web, electronic mail, electronic file transfer, and shared CD-ROM-based databases.
• Hardware
  • 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. It 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.

Production Environment

• Identified and de-identified HERON data is stored on an 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.