News

How can doctors predict — and thus help prevent — when a patient is at increased risk of cardiac arrest while in the hospital? Does emergency room crowding affect care of patients on the hospital floor? What previously unknown links exist between weather events, staffing, patients’ lab values, outcomes, and other data, and how can this information be used to improve care?

The CRDW is an example of the kind of large, well-curated dataset that can make this advanced analysis possible. To learn more about how big data is making hospitals safer, read the interview with our director Sam Volchenboum in the Washington Post.

A ‘Netflix-like’ predictive model: Hospital systems could pinpoint which patients are most likely to code on their watch

We are happy to announce that CRI Director Sam Volchenboum has been elected the next Chair of the Genomics and Translational Bioinformatics Working Group of the American Medical Informatics Association. This working group is dedicated to facilitating communication and collaboration between scientists to advance translational research and clinical care through the use of genomics data. Sam will lead the group in initiatives to increase data sharing, promote genomics data standards and interoperability, develop educational opportunities for clinicians, and more. Congratulations to Sam for this honor!

Check out this interview with our director, Sam Volchenboum, MD, PhD, about how large sets of patient data (like that available in the CRDW) can be used to streamline care, empower patients, and improve healthcare outcomes.

The Structure of Health Care: How Patient Data Impacts Quality of Care

A team of University of Chicago scientists is working to find ways to repurpose generic and over-the-counter drugs to treat zoonotic diseases, potentially making treatment for these infections more affordable and accessible worldwide. The CRI Bioinformatics Core’s resources and expertise allowed them to run fast, efficient analyses of the drugs’ effectiveness. Read about their work at the Institute for Translational Medicine.

A CRI-led paper published this month in PLOS ONE introduced the scientific community to ExScalibur, a new set of state-of-the-art pipelines for the bioinformatics analysis of Whole Exome Sequencing (WES) data. Read more.

Data storage users with existing labshares can now take advantage of the CRI’s new data archival service. Our system allows researchers to securely archive data that is not in active use, save money on long-term storage, and comply with regulatory and grant requirements regarding data retention. Learn more in our Archival Storage User Guide.

This month, the March of Dimes Foundation announced a collaboration with the University of Chicago, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and Duke Medicine to create a new March of Dimes Prematurity Research Center focused on determining the currently unknown factors causing premature birth.

Under the leadership of PI and Program Director Carole Ober, PhD, the University of Chicago Medicine will have the lead role in this project, to which March of Dimes will contribute $10 million over the next five years. The Center for Research Informatics will contribute bioinformatics and computing resources to this important research.

Read more about the center and the CRI’s contributions here.