The Core's mission is to help researchers and QI teams use the data we already have in our many data repositories. We help you leverage these data to answer important questions, using tools of traditional clinical epidemiology and health services research. Specific services include:

1. Automating parts of traditional clinical research

  • Example: Your research assistant has filled out case report forms on 1,000 patients. Your protocol now calls for 15 different laboratory values, demographics, and length of stay data.
  • Service: The Core can pull these additional values for you and provide them in electronic format.

2. Data manipulation

  • Example: You have one Excel sheet that has your subject information - one row per subject - and another with lab results - each lab in one row, so many rows per patient. What you want is one row per patient, with admission labs and discharge labs, but you're having trouble getting it like you want.
  • Service: We can help you get the data into whatever structure you and your biostatistician need.

3. Preliminary data for grants

  • Example: You are planning an R01, and think your grant would be much stronger if you knew the median length of stay and overall mortality rate in 50-65 year old women hospitalized on Wednesdays who had a previous cardiac catheterization at BIDMC.
  • Service: The Core can extract these data from existing clinical data repositories and help you

4. Building high-complexity, large electronic cohorts

  • Example: You are interested in whether proton-pump inhibitors cause pneumonia and Clostridium difficile. You want to adjust for demographics, comorbidities, and many other factors - and you also need to understand which patients received proton pump inhibitors before their infection.
  • Service: The Core can work with you to build complete, large cohorts with detailed data on medications, laboratory results, movement in the hospital, procedures, diagnoses, and other factors.
  • These services are generally available at a rate of $94/hour. If you feel that our services could help you, but you do not have immediately available funding, please reach out to discuss. If there are other services that would be helpful (such as study design/implementation consulting), please let us know.


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