Informatics and Data Resources
The state-of-the-art informatics and data resources at the Children’s Mercy Research Institute (CMRI) ensure that investigators and their teams have seamless and efficient access to the applications and systems that can advance basic, clinical and translational research.
Available CMRI informatics and data resources include bioinformatics, Cerner Health Facts® and PowerTrials®, clinical trials management, cloud and high-performance computing, and access to the Pediatric Health Information System®, REDCap, Ingenuity Power Explorer and R Studio.
Researchers at the CMRI have access to open source, commercial and locally developed bioinformatics tools, enabling workflows such as alignment and variant detection, structural variant detection, variant effect prediction and characterization, phenotype-driven automated diagnosis, somatic variant detection, de novo assembly, bulk and single cell RNA analysis, single cell ATAC-seq and whole genome bisulfite sequencing (WGBS) analysis. Interactive analysis environments such as RStudio and Jupyter Notebooks are provided.
Cerner Health Facts® is a data warehouse of HIPAA-compliant de-identified electronic health records providing detailed information from participating hospitals and clinics on pharmacy orders, laboratory results, discrete clinical findings, demographics and billing. Health Facts has de-identified data from 69 million patients, from 6.8 billion clinical events across 664 health systems through 2018.
Cerner Real-World DataTM (CRWD) is a national, de-identified, person-centric data set solution that enables researchers to leverage longitudinal record data from contributing organizations. Currently, CRWD has de-identified data from 101 million patients with 1.5 billion encounters, 2.3 billion conditions across 122 health systems as of March 2022.
Cloud-based data storage and computing are available through Microsoft Azure. An Azure ExpressRoute provides dedicated, high-capacity and low-latency connection to resources in the Azure cloud.
Data science experts work with investigators to use data resources such as Cerner Real-World DataTM and Cerner Health Facts® in support of research as well as access to R Studio in a high-performance computing environment.
GeoMarker is a HIPAA-compliant web application for geocoding addresses. Geocoding is the process of converting a text address to coordinates for mapping. GeoMarker can be used to get the point location (latitude and longitude) for a list of addresses (batch geocoding), aggregate census geographic identifiers, determine drive time to pediatric care centers, determine neighborhood indicators, and obtain composite Area Deprivation Index score for geocoded addresses.
A local cluster is available to CMRI investigators needing high-performance computing initiatives.
The CMRI’s human factors analysis services can include ethnography, workflow analysis, hierarchical task analysis, contextual inquiry, heuristic analysis and usability testing.
As a member of the Children’s Hospital Association, Children’s Mercy has access to the Pediatric Health Information System® (PHIS), a comparative pediatric database that includes clinical and resource utilization data for inpatient, ambulatory surgery, emergency department and observation unit patient encounters for more than 45 children's hospitals.
REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a highly configurable, HIPAA-compliant and secure web-based system to capture a wide variety of research data.
The Spatial Cohort Analysis and Location Explorer (SCALE) is a secure web application that makes spatial analysis of health and related place-based data possible for health researchers and administrators.
A team of software engineers can support the design and development of databases, custom applications, augmented reality projects and interfaces needed for funded research projects.
TriNetX is a HIPAA and GDPR-compliant global health research network driven by CM's Cerner Millennium data. TriNetX combines real-time access to longitudinal clinical data with state-of-the-art analytics to optimize protocol design, feasibility, and cohort analysis and replaces i2b2 as the primary patient cohort discovery tool.