CTSA: Georgetown-Howard Universities for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS)

The Georgetown-Howard Universities Center for Clinical and Translational Science (GHUCCTS) is a collaborative research center that includes two major universities and three affiliated hospital systems. GHUCCTS institutions include the Georgetown University Medical Center, Howard University, MedStar Health and the Washington DC Veterans Affairs Medical Center (VAMC).

ICBI  leads the Informatics core for GHUCCTS and provides critical services and support to all GHUCCTS Core functions, enabling access to data, software tools and applications used for research, collaboration and outreach across the entire spectrum of GHUCCTS’ activities.

Our aims are planned and designed with close collaboration and continued interactions with other core functions on cohort discovery, access to data, analysis and a secure infrastructure for information sharing. We support the community with custom tools, access to clinical trial management system, reporting capabilities and data visualization tools.

ICBI manages over 100 Terabytes of data and provides access to over 4.2 million unique patient records in the DC area. The Patient Data Access and Cohort Discovery services provide researchers with access to multiple data sources, including EHRs, patient registries and billing / administrative databases. Data governance and access policies have been established enabling access to multiple GHUCCTS institutional EHRs. ICBI analysts make extensive use of non-EHR tools such as the Amalga Hospital Information System that enables sharing of disparate data from multiple datasets across the healthcare system by collecting information from more than 150 MedStar sources.

ICBI is also a liaison to CTSA HUBs’ Informatics by actively participating in and organizing scientific events such as the Annual Big Data in Biomedicine symposium, Spring CTSA Program Meeting, AMIA and others.

Sponsor: NIH/NCATS