New Cohort Discovery Tools Available to UR Researchers Via TriNetX

TriNetX, a user-friendly cohort discovery tool launched at the University of Rochester last year, now offers two new features for University of Rochester researchers: a network that offers an expanded database of over 60 million patients and a set of analytic tools with which to analyze that data. The Research Network and Analyze features make TriNetX an even more powerful tool to help researchers determine study feasibility and generate and explore new hypotheses.

Since July of 2019, UR researchers have been able to use TriNetX to search a HIPAA-compliant version of eRecord to determine whether there are enough patients that meet their study criteria within the UR Medicine system. While the TriNetX Research Network does not expand the pool of patients that researchers could recruit for their studies, it significantly expands their access to patient data that they can search to generate and explore hypotheses.

This alternate network database includes patients from 40 health care institutions, including the UR Medicine system. Users are able to design and run queries across 60 million fully anonymized patient records in the research network. Though researchers cannot export data from their searchers, they are able to use the full suite of TriNetX interface tools, including TriNetX Analyze, to explore this data in the platform.

TriNetX Analyze provides on-demand access to a set of intuitive tools to analyze longitudinal clinical data within TriNetX. Researchers can use these tools to compare patient cohorts across the vast TriNetX Research Network, for instance to investigate characteristics of patients on different treatments, with different underlying conditions or in different demographic groups.

This module also allows researchers to conduct comparative effectiveness research and compare lines of treatment for any disease - drawing from data on how patients are treated and when they switch treatments. Researchers can also identify the risk of a specific outcome in a given cohort using retrospective data in the using TriNetX Analyze.

To use these new tools, you must first complete the TriNetX 101 – Basic Functionality Course in MyPath and request access to TriNetX. Once you have access, training videos on these new features are available within the TriNetX Training Center (login required).

If you have any questions, please contact CTSI_InformaticsTeam@urmc.rochester.edu.

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TriNetX is one of several cohort discovery tools offered by the UR CTSI Informatics team, which is supported by the University of Rochester CTSA award number UL1 TR002001 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health.

Michael Hazard | 11/19/2020

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