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| Systems Engineering and Architecture |
| IRT Information |
Bridging Research and Patient Care
Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment
The Technology behind STRIDE
The STRIDE has benefited from several recent advances in information technologies and informatics. Innovations in the Java technology platform offer advanced image processing, security, database access and distributed application components. The aggregate of these capabilities compose the cross-platform foundation upon which the STRIDE is built.
Common nomenclatures for encoding and transferring medical data also contributed to STRIDE’s development. The standards work to ensure structured data including diagnoses, medications, and labs can be consistently represented and analyzed irrespective of their origin. One standard of particular importance is SNOMED, a clinical terminology developed by the College of American Pathologists. SNOMED provides a dynamic, sustainable and scientifically validated infrastructure that enables clinicians, researchers, and patients to share health-care knowledge worldwide across clinical specialties and sites of care.
IRT advances translational medicine through technological innovation that closes the loop between the bench and the bedside. One such innovation under development is the Stanford Translational Research Integrated Database Environment (STRIDE).
The STRIDE is a multi-year project to create a secure, integrated and HIPAA-compliant data repository of clinical and research information. Designed with the input of researchers from the School of Medicine, STRIDE facilitates access to structured biomedical data, electronic documents and imaging data by linking these items to a common database model using a set of data representation standards.
The repository fills a critical need within the School’s research infrastructure. Investigators pursuing translational research must be able to access accurate clinical data. As a shared data repository for both clinical and research data, the STRIDE removes many common barriers to the interdisciplinary flow of information.
In achieving this efficiency, IRT was careful to address the security challenges posed by handling clinical data. As a result, the STRIDE contains numerous mechanisms to ensure all protected health information is handled in strict accordance with HIPAA regulations.
The STRIDE provides three key areas of functionality: data management, data integration and data discovery. Its data management capabilities leverage the benefits of structured data entry. Researchers input data into the STRIDE using established data capture forms, which automatically encode and categorize the data according to common biomedical nomenclatures. Stored in the common repository with other relevant data, the data can then be queried, viewed and analyzed independent of its origin.
Merging data from disparate source repositories into a single patient record, the STRIDE’s data integration capabilities allow authorized researchers to comprehensively study a subject’s condition over time without having to query individual clinical information sources. Each record can accommodate a range of data formats, including multimedia content such as radiology and photographic images and genetic information; manually entered data like patient assessments; electronically capture data such as lab results; and structured data from clinical systems like billing information. Advanced text processing tools also enable researchers to search and analyze doctor notes and other “free text” narratives from clinical records by automatically indexing this otherwise hard-to-access information.
Lastly, the STRIDE is a vehicle for data discovery. Principle investigators can query for non-identifying patient data to gather statistics on potential trial participants and assess the feasibility of their studies. Once a study is approved by the Institutional Review Board, the university’s regulatory body for all research activities, researchers can seek permission to access patient-identifying data to carry out their investigations.
Housing an ever-expanding body of clinical and research data, the STRIDE will eventually enable researchers to identify patterns and make new inferences. In this way, it is expected that the STRIDE will not only support the investigations of researchers but will accelerate the process of making new discoveries.
