Research IT organization changes
Research IT is now part of a bigger and unified Research Technology team led by Dr. Todd Ferris. Research IT is renamed to Research Technology Engineering Services. The REDCap team, previously part of Research IT, is now part of Research Technology Application Solutions. The Research Technology team also includes Data Services (fka Research Informatics Center). Stay tuned for a more comprehensive update.
mHealth Platform
The mHealth Platform is a set of HIPAA-compliant services to provide a secure place for mobile applications to store data and perform tasks that cannot be accomplished directly on a device.
The mHealth Platform provides services for mobile applications to handle participant sign up, email verification, consent, and participation status. It also provides services for getting sensor and participant data off the device and into our environment. Data can be accessed via dashboards or downloaded via researcher APIs. The platform adds support for Google's Firestore database via the Firebase SDK, and related services such as identity management. Apps developed by Sage SDK and Cardinal Kit are supported.
CHOIR learning health platform
CHOIR learning health care platform is developed and managed by Research IT and is built under the leadership of Prof Sean Mackey. CHOIR used to collect longitudinal patient surveys for clinics and multi-insitute clinical studies. CHOIR tracks patient health status over time. Patients receive email requests to complete their assessments at various times (for example, prior to an appointment or after an intervention), and they can complete these assessments at home using their phone or computer, or at the clinic using a provided tablet. Results are made available to the doctors for clinical care and can be accessed for quality or research purposes. Assessments typically use standard NIH PROMIS instruments with computer adaptive testing to improve scoring accuracy while minimizing patient burden.
Research IT develops the software and customizes it for clinical and research deployment.
Stanford Emerging Applications Lab
Research IT partners with and supports the Stanford Emerging Applications Lab (SEAL) team, to build and operate a secure HIPAA-compliant clinical research and experimentation platform.
SEAL application is engineered by Research IT where the platform governance is provided by TDS team. The application runs on GCP and integrates with SHC Epic via FHIR. Its primary goal is to provide a rapid mechanism to add new innovative applets for the physicians. The applets are chosen by the SEAL team in collaboration with physicians.
STAnford medicine Research data Repository (STARR)
A core function of Research IT has been to build and maintain STARR (STAnford medicine Research data Repository), a crucial resource for Stanford biomedical research. STARR is a clinical data lake of live Epic data from Stanford Health Care (SHC), the Stanford Children’s Hospital (SCH), the University Healthcare Alliance (UHA), Packard Children's Health Alliance (PCHA) clinics, and other auxiliary data from Hospital applications such as radiology PACS.
STARR supports many different data models (e.g. STRIDE in-house, OHDSI OMOP, PEDSNet), tools (STRIDE Cohort and Chart review tools, OHDSI ATLAS) and services (PACS Radiology Imaging data access and PHI scrubbing).
Complex Event Processing Engine
This is our HL7 feed processing engine that you can leverage for real time recruitment.
Nero and Carina Research Computing Platform
Research IT partners with and supports Stanford UIT's Research Computing Center (SRCC) team, to build and support a secure HIPAA and High Risk compliant data science platform, Nero (Cloud), and its on-premise counterpart, Carina (Nero Gen 2).
While these platforms are broadly accessible for research using High Risk and PHI data, STARR is integrated with the platform. The SRCC team provides a range of services including hardware procurement and maintenance, OS upgrades, cloud integration, security requirements to meet HIPAA compliance, tool integration and research computing support. Researchers simply need to request access to the secure platform, but otherwise, need not worry about hardware procurement, and system security.
Research IT partners with SRCC to provide STARR office hours and data science training on Nero.
Following writeups are provided by Research IT staff for your convenience. If you have questions, please request a consultation (button on left hand side navigation) with us.
- Research IT Resources Grant writeup: If you are writing a grant and require information about Research IT managed resources and consulting services, this document attempts to present relevant information.
- Glossary: Terminologies, Stanford workflows, policies, and offices when working with patient data (or other similar High Risk data)
Following articles are technology or R&D spotlights written by Research IT staff. They are for information only.
- Power of the Commons, D. Balraj and S. Datta, TDS Connection Newsletter, May 2023 (link): Learn more about how Stanford Harnesses Diverse Data to Enhance Population Health Research.
- Groundbreaking TiDE Uses NLP to ‘Clean’ Patient Data, S. Datta, TDS Connection Newsletter, Feb 2023 (link): Learn more about privacy-preserving PHI scrubbing.
- FastFax Uses Machine Learning to Triage Urgent Patient Referrals, TDS Team News, Feb 2023 (link): A machine learning (ML) and image processing enabled technology called “FastFax” to address prioritization of urgent referrals mixed in with routine referrals. The FastFax solution was also one of the early users of SHC’s Mulesoft Anypoint Platform that allows SHC to integrate data and applications across on-premises and cloud environments.
- Smarter Data Warehousing Preserves a ‘Goldmine’ of Information, S. Malunjkar, TDS Connection Newsletter, Jan 2023 (link): Learn more about pediatric bedside monitoring data in STARR.
- Matching Clinical Trial Subjects with Researchers in Real Time, S. Malunjkar, TDS Connection Newsletter, Sep 2022 (link): Learn more about our CEP engine that can harness HL7 feeds to create real time alerts.
- STARR and Our Journey Towards Better Data Quality and Accessibility, P. Desai, TDS Connection Newsletter, Aug 2022 (link): Learn more about our focus on research data warehouse quality.
Move Toward a More Synergistic Model Helps Improve Data Quality, P. Desai, Center for Leading Collaboration and Innovation (CLIC) Insights to Inspire 2022 blog, May 2022. (link): Stanford CTSA submits its research Clinical Data Warehouse metrics using STARR-OMOP. Here we present the innovations leading to improvements in STARR-OMOP data quality and data refresh rate.
Other Stanford help
Stanford Data Science Resources
The Stanford Data Science Resources web portal can help you access the tools, datasets, data platforms and methodologies for conducting innovative clinical and translational research.
The School of Medicine offers a limited initial consultation (underwritten by the Dean’s Office and Stanford's Clinical and Translational Sciences Award (CTSA) Program) to help you identify the resources you need. These consults may lead to longer-term engagements and partnerships with one or more of the consulting groups from across the School of Medicine.
Stanford Course in Clinical Research
Spectrum runs a course titled Spectrum Intensive Course in Clinical Research (ICCR): Study Design and Performance. This is a one-week immersion course for new clinical investigators, senior residents, fellows, and junior faculty (Assistant Professor and below from any faculty line) interested in pursuing careers in clinical and translational research and who have not had formal training in clinical research as part of a Masters or PhD degree program in Public Health or Epidemiology.
To sign up for ICCR, please visit Spectrum education and training site.
