National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of NIH awards Grand Opportunities grant to BMC

Boston Medical Center (BMC), today announced that it has been awarded a Grand Opportunities (GO) grant by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant will allow researchers to study disparities in cardiovascular health based on racial, ethnic, gender, language, socioeconomic, and geographic factors, including the impact of healthcare reform and the economic downturn in relation to these factors. The research study will be supported by patient data from BMC and the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), as well as an informatics platform and data warehouse implementation from Recombinant Data Corp.

“Healthcare reform in Massachusetts has drawn national attention, but little is known about the impact of reform on patients of differing economic and ethnic backgrounds,” noted Nancy Kressin, Associate Professor of Medicine and co-principal investigator of the project at Boston Medical Center. “This study will specifically focus on patients with or at risk for cardiovascular disease to further our understanding of how healthcare reform and the economic downturn have affected health outcomes for different population groups.”

A vital technological component of the research study is the i2b2 Workbench, an NIH-funded open source informatics framework that enables researchers at BMC and UMMS to access large scale de-identified patient data for aggregate-level analysis. This component of the work will be led by William G. Adams, MD, co-principal investigator, Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Director of BU-CTSI Clinical Research Informatics at Boston University School of Medicine/BMC.

“Collaborative informatics efforts such as ours have the potential to transform the way we study and understand health and healthcare both locally and across the country,” said Adams.

“UMass Medical School was a national leader in adopting i2b2 as part of our MICARD translational research project,” said Ralph Zottola, PhD, Associate CIO, UMass Medical School. “i2b2 presents a radical advance in the ability to use clinical data for translational research and disparities monitoring while adhering to the utmost privacy protection for patients.”

Recombinant Data Corp., the commercial support provider for the i2b2 platform, specializes in the tools and techniques necessary to integrate and de-identify healthcare data from disparate source systems into data warehouses for secondary use and analytics.

“Recombinant is pleased to support BMC and UMMS in this ground-breaking disparities research project,” stated Peter Emerson, CEO, Recombinant Data Corp. “Having previously implemented i2b2 at each institution, we have a significant head start in delivering the expert technical assistance required to ensure this unique research collaboration succeeds.”