i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) is a National Center for Biomedical Computing based at Partners HealthCare System. The i2b2 center was funded by the National Institutes of Health, from 2004 to 2014, to build a Ã¢ÂÂscalable frameworkÃ¢ÂÂ and resources for enabling researchers to use existing data for investigation of diseases with genetic origins. The framework and resources built by i2b2 investigators have Ã¢ÂÂenjoyed wide international adoption by the CTSA network, academic health centers, and industryÃ¢ÂÂ. Secondary use of electronic health records (EHRs) constituted one of the cornerstones of i2b2. Over the years, i2b2 investigators built various corpora in support of Natural Language Processing (NLP) research that aimed to extract meaningful information from narrative health records in order to enable their use for disease discovery and investigation. These corpora were developed with two goals in mind: 1. To enable progress in the field of clinical NLP by advancing the state of the art. To enable clinical applications of NLP. 
Practical applications for natural language processing in clinical research: The 2014 i2b2/UTHealth shared tasks