Research IT expertise

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. 

In the meantime, please be assured that the consultation button will reach the right service team. 

Our service catalog

Electronic Data Capture and Surveys

We help you navigate the pros/cons of all EDC options (commercial, open source, and academic) depending on your needs. Research IT helps teams evaluate survey and mobile technologies for capturing moderate- and high-risk research data directly from research subjects, research workflow, and end-point devices. Limitations on what you can effectively use will depend on the data risk, data volume, license model, and services available.

Learn more about Stanford options: REDCap, REDCap Cloud, Forte (OnCore suite), Qualtrics, Twilio.

Stanford REDCap customization

Stanford REDCap platform is a flexible architecture that can support custom module development. We have developed hundreds of custom modules that support a variety of project specific features. In most cases, we can whip up a custom module in matter of days to give your studies unprecedented power.

Mobile study design

Research IT can help you with mHealth strategies, best practices and pitfalls, backend connection with Stanford mHealth server, connections with existing computing solutions on campus, Stanford’s commercial partners, or other campus researchers, custom mobile solutions, and more.

Customizing mHealth server

The mHealth server is a scalable, multi-tenant,  cloud based, HIPAA-compliant platform with APIs for registering participants and saving data gathered by mobile apps. The goal is to enable research teams to build mobile applications without having to deal with the full complexity and costs associated with operating a secure and compliant hosting environment. In addition to the platform infrastructure, Research IT provides consulting and can customize the services as needed in support of particular research projects.

Wrangling healthcare data

We have traditionally supported healthcare data management for Stanford Medicine research initiatives. In 2017, Research Informatics Center (RIC) was carved out of Research IT. A subset of services such as registry submission, query design and optimization now reside with RIC. We continue to support complex data wrangling initiatives requiring infrastucture development such as ACT i2b2 support, PEDSNet Common Data Model development, department wide data lakes, integrations with Hospital ecosystem (e.g. SMART on FHIR) etc.

Customizing CHOIR Learning Healthcare System

CHOIR is a learning health care platform. It tracks patient health status over time. Results are made available to the doctors for clinical care and can be accessed for quality or research purposes. We customize the patient surveys and provide custom reporting for the clinic to match clinic specific workflows and needs. 

The Collaborative Health Outcomes Information Registry (CHOIR) system is a Learning Healthcare System developed at Stanford (funded by Prof Sean Mackey, Stanford) and used by numerous academic medical centers in the US and abroad. It has been used to monitor health status and outcomes for tens of thousands of patients at SHC and LPCH as part of clinical care, quality improvement, and research. The  platform is HIPAA compliant and multi-tenent. The underlying platform development cost are paid for by Prof Mackey. An individual clinic's operational costs are nominal. 

Customizing HL7 feeds for real time research

Research IT has a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine on a live HL7 message feed of clinical events from both SHC and SCH. Lab and pharmacy orders, lab results, patient admits, transfers, and discharges and other essential messages can be used to configure real-time alerts. We can tap into the HL7 feed and customize alerts for your research use.

In an example use, March of Dimes Prematurity Research uses a CEP alert to study causes of prematurity as a step toward developing ways to prevent it. Premature birth is a complex problem with no single solution. About 380,000 babies are born prematurely each year in the United States. In about half of cases, the cause is unknown.

Custom Software Development

The Research IT team specializes in writing production software that gathers, stores, and analyzes PHI data according to HIPAA requirements. We coordinate with Stanford data hosting teams to support integrated systems that run on secure hardware or cloud infrastructure. If our existing portfolio of platforms can't be customized to meet your needs, we can build custom software specific to your workflow, deploy and manage systems requiring long-term support, and more.

We routinely create secure, compliant, containerized, deploy-anywhere solutions with Java, PHP, Oracle, MySQL, PostgreSQL and more to manage high-risk data and ensure regulatory compliance. Over the years, our solutions team and applications team have partnered with many departments and researchers on many projects requiring management of high-risk data and/or complex regulatory compliance.

Please visit this section below for some examples of custom developed projects.