Biomedical Translational Research Information System

CSC is helping develop and operate a powerful new system called BTRIS – the Biomedical Translational Research Information System – that vastly improves access to information and data usability and significantly accelerates the medical research life cycle. CSC's BTRIS team currently includes skills in program management, architecture, healthcare data warehousing, Web services development, medical terminology, data analysis, testing, database administration, systems administration, and other key areas of expertise.Available to the NIH intramural community, BTRIS is an integrated data repository that brings together research data from the Clinical Center – the on-campus hospital where research-based patient care is provided– and other NIH Institutes and Centers. It speeds up development of new medical treatments two ways: (1) by making the wealth of NIH data easier to access, compile and analyze, and (2) by automating routine administrative tasks so that researchers have more time for research.BTRIS gives NIH investigators access to identifiable data for the patients on their own protocols, and it makes de-identified data across all protocols available to all NIH researchers to support new research. Researchers can query de-identified data to evaluate hypotheses and to identify candidate patients for inclusion in new studies. Tools such as advanced search, filtering, and aggregation methods let researchers create data sets that support ongoing studies and stimulate new ideas. This sharing of data allows for a much richer and more robust opportunities for scientific inquiry. The BTRIS solution architecture is flexible enough to accommodate all source data types that may be required, even those that don't yet exist. Designed for interoperability with other large biomedical data repositories, it is likely to become increasingly useful over many years.As of late 2010, BTRIS contained clinical data from 30 sources spanning the NIH Clinical Center, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism adding data from other institutes, with several institutes planned for each year. That work is expected to take about five years, after which further expansion is planned, enabling BTRIS to collect information from external data sources such as NIH grantees and providing data for clinical trials review.