A Large-Scale Informatics Database to Advance Research and Discovery of the Effects of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Clinical research advances in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and behavioral health have always been restricted by the quantity and quality of the data as well as the difficulty of collecting standardized clinical elements. Those barriers, together with the complexity of evaluating TBI, have resulted in serious challenges for clinicians, researchers, and organizations interested in analyzing the short- and long-term effects of TBI. In an effort to raise awareness about existing and cost-effective ways to collect clinical data within the Department of Defense, this article describes some of the steps taken to quickly build a large-scale informatics database to facilitate collection of standardized clinical data and obtain trends of the longitudinal outcomes of service members diagnosed with mild TBI. The database was built following the Defense of Health Agency guidelines and currently has millions of longitudinal clinical data points, Department of Defense-wide clinical data for service members diagnosed with mild TBI to support population studies, and multiple built-in analytical applications to enable interactive data exploration and analysis.