CER Hub: An informatics platform for conducting comparative effectiveness research using multi-institutional,...

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Comparative Effectiveness Research
• Clinical Data Management

Background:

• Comparative effectiveness research (CER) faces challenges in integrating data from diverse electronic health record (EHR) systems across multiple institutions.
• Standardized data capture and analysis are crucial for robust multi-institutional CER studies.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce the CER Hub, a web-based informatics platform designed for developing and conducting CER studies.
• To enable the combination of comprehensive electronic clinical data from multiple healthcare organizations.

Main Methods:

• The CER Hub utilizes a data processing pipeline with informatics standards for data representation.
• It provides web-based tools for creating study-specific data processing applications.
• The platform ensures standardized access to patient-centric EHR data across participating organizations.

Main Results:

• The CER Hub is currently supporting two CER studies involving data from six diverse health systems.
• These studies focus on medication effectiveness for asthma control and smoking cessation services in primary care.

Conclusions:

• The CER Hub offers four key capabilities: processing free-text and coded EHR data, a distributed data processing environment, a clinical data-interchange format, and a library of shareable applications.
• It addresses the complexities of multi-institutional research by providing integrated informatics tools for EHR data studies.