UR CTSI Offers New Electronic Medical Record Cohort Discovery Tool

Do you have a great idea for a clinical study, but don’t know if enough patients would meet your study criteria? Now the UR CTSI, in partnership with URMC’s Information Systems Division, offers a new tool that can help. TriNetX provides access to longitudinal clinical data in near real time and uses state-of-the-art analytics to help researchers identify potential study participants based on their specific study criteria.

With TriNetX, researchers can search 1.5 million electronic medical records (EMR) from across UR Medicine. This user-friendly tool can show researchers how many patients meet their study’s criteria and can help them tweak their inclusion and exclusion criteria to ensure they can capture a large enough pool of patients.

“This new tool makes clinical data more accessible, helping researchers develop hypotheses and test the feasibility of their studies,” said Jeanne Holden-Wiltse, M.P.H, M.B.A, director of Informatics at the UR CTSI.

Researchers can search on demographics, diagnoses, procedures, medications, labs and more, and easily filter their results without having to re-build their search. The system provides visually appealing and easy-to-understand graphs and charts showing not only historical data from patient visits but also predictions of future patient enrollment opportunities.“This is going to have an enormous positive impact on creating or modifying study protocols and determining a dataset for potential abstract submissions or manuscript preparations,” said Maria Frazer, a clinical research project manager in URMC’s Department of Neurosurgery, who piloted the software. “It’s a great resource for feasibility for our future research studies.”

The Trial Connect feature of the global TriNetX network enables potential clinical trial sponsors to request patient counts from URMC to determine if we have enough patients that meet criteria for a specific clinical trial.  Since URMC joined TriNetX in April, pharmaceutical companies have invited us to take part in 19 clinical trials that might benefit our patients. So far, the UR CTSI’s Office of Clinical Research has connected URMC researchers with 13 of those studies and another three are pending.

“Our goal in joining this network was to bring high quality, cutting edge clinical trials to URMC for the benefit of our community,” said Martin Zand, M.D., Ph.D., senior associate dean for Clinical Research at URMC and co-director of the UR CTSI.  “In just the first few months, TriNetX has already greatly expanded our access to such trials.”

TriNetX is available to all URMC researchers who complete a 45-minute basic training session from the UR CTSI Informatics team. The online training can be accessed via Blackboard or MyPath and is equipped with closed captioning. While the tool is designed for researchers to use the system self-sufficiently, the UR CTSI Informatics team will provide support for specific questions and will offer training classes beginning in August.

Check out our website for more information or contact the Informatics team with questions.

Michael Hazard | 7/5/2019

You may also like