Loyola receives Special Innovation Award for developing self-serve clinical research database

Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine has received a $6,000 Special Innovation Award for developing a user-friendly, self-serve clinical research database that will help physicians and scientists conduct groundbreaking medical research.

The award from the Association of American Medical Colleges highlights innovative, system-wide processes that improve the opportunity for research.

Loyola's Clinical Research Database is a collaboration between Stritch School of Medicine and Loyola University Health System. It contains de-identified data from nearly 2 million unique Loyola patients, including 6.6 million patient encounters and more than 1 billion clinical data points.

Data from electronic medical records are put into Hadoop, an open-source software project used to store and process large data sets. The Loyola Clinical Research Database is efficient for clinical and population-sciences research. It protects patients' privacy, since names and other patient identifiers are not included in the database.

The Clinical Research Database enables researchers to perform "preparatory for research" data aggregations and analyses themselves, in just minutes - streamlining a process that previously took weeks.

The Clinical Research Database also will be used by Loyola to aggregate data for a new regional health research network called CAPriCORN (Chicago Area Patient Centered Outcomes Research Network).