Other Stanford Medicine 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.

Through these consulting groups, you can access the many datasets of the DASHER data commons, as well as a variety of platforms and tools and research services, including expert advice on databases and management, study design and implementation, biostatistics, informatics, technology integration and much more.

For more information, visit their website.

You may be interested in a Clinical Informatics Consult.

Given a specific clinical question, they provide you with a report with a descriptive summary of similar patients in Stanford’s clinical data warehouse, treatment choices made, and observed outcomes as envisioned in the "Green Button" paper.

Please visit their website to get in touch.

There are two great resources for biostatistical support at Stanford Medicine, the Quantitative Sciences Unit, in the Biomedical Informatics Research division of the Department of Medicine, and the  Data Studio in the Department of Biomedical Data Science. Please visit their websites for information on how to reach them for a consultation.

Ensuring compliance with all applicable laws, rules and regulations is crucially important, and Stanford supports you with the following partner organizations:

• The Stanford Research Compliance office on main campus is your first stop. They are charged with preventing harm to study subjects.
• The University Privacy Office is responsible for data confidentiality.
• The Information Security Office on the main campus is responsible for data security. They work closely with Privacy to help avoid HIPAA breaches from occurring.
• Most of the clinical record is pre-approved by the hospitals for research use (after all applicable processes have been duly completed), but there are certain types of clinical data that require additional approval by Hospital Compliance. Hospital cost data is a good example of this: actual procedure costs are considered far too sensitive for general research use.
• If you plan to build a new computing system that handles high risk data, you will be required to complete a Data Risk Assessment.
• And if you are sharing high risk data with any outside entity, you will need at the very least a Data Use Agreement

The Stanford experts in population health studies can be found at the Stanford Center for Population Health Sciences. Information on their services and how to reach them is available on their website.

The Stanford Research Computing Center operates a cluster of secure compute servers, including some high performance systems, suitable for running compute-intensive algorithms on big data. Their service offering for high risk data / PHI is known as "Nero".

You can consult their Office Hours and Support page to find ways to get in touch with them.

Research IT operates and supports REDCap, a secure, safe, reliable and auditable multi-user research data capture and patient reported outcomes collection system. It is designed to be self-service, so you can get started using it right away. Not convinced yet? Check this out.

There are training videos online in REDCap itself, just click on the Training Resources tab.

There is Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on the REDCap wiki.

REDCap Office Hours are 9:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. on Wednesdays online via a Zoom meeting if you want to drop in for a chat.

Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) are a valuable component of many prospective research studies. In addition to REDCap, which offers patient-facing surveys built into the research data management system, Research IT also operates CHOIR, a clinically focused patient-reported outcomes system. While REDCap is the ideal tool for a lab with a tech-savvy research coordinator, CHOIR is purpose-built to work smoothly with clinical workflows at Stanford and can be operated by clinical front desk staff in clinics with an integrated clinical research mission.

If you are interested in hearing more about either REDCap or CHOIR for patient-reported outcomes, please contact Research IT by filling out their online request form.