Informatics Core Services

INFORMATICS CORE SERVICES (ICS) SHARED RESOURCE: PROJECT SUMMARY Informatics Core Services (ICS) provides a wide range of biomedical informatics and data analytics support to cancer-focused researchers at Siteman Cancer Center (SCC) and throughout Washington University School of Medicine (WUSM). ICS provides electronic health record (EHR) data brokerage and electronic data capture services to support clinical and translational research at WUSM. As part of these services, ICS operates the Research Data Core, which contains data from Washington University Physicians and BJC HealthCare electronic health records spanning over 20 years. ICS provides billable services to broker access to deidentified, limited, and fully identified EHR data. ICS also performs extensive analytics and software development utilizing EHR data, including the use of natural language processing tools for data extraction. Access to ICS expertise, methods, and tools is initiated through the submission of web-based requests for services, followed by in-person consultative project planning sessions, or by direct consultations that lead to the engagement of ICS faculty and staff at an appropriate level given project needs. Services are triaged, tracked, implemented, and supported using a systematic and Agile project management methodology and tools that span all aspects of ICS’s operations. Over the last grant period, ICS contributed to more than 100 cancer-focused SCC member publications and 20 types of NIH-NCI grants, including more than 30 R01, 10 T32, and numerous U24, U54, P50, P30, R37, K12, R21, U10, and U01 grants. ICS has three shared resource (SR) services under development in preparation for the next grant period: synthetic data service (MDClone) that transforms real patient data into a statistically-similar synthetic derivative, clinical natural language processing to enable the ability to extract data from free text, and capabilities to support SCC investigators with data deposition into current or emergent data commons platforms.