Team awarded five-year, $25 million cooperative agreement from National Center for Advancing Translational Science

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Oregon Health & Science University, Northwestern University, the University of Washington and Sage Bionetworks, together with the Scripps Research Institute, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Iowa and the Jackson Laboratory, have been awarded a five-year, $25 million cooperative agreement from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to create a new Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) Program: the National Center for Data to Health (CD2H).

The award will coalesce and coordinate informatics activities across the CTSA Program, a network of more than 50 medical research institutions, to provide collaborative clinical and translational research infrastructure.

The new program will be led by Melissa Haendel (Oregon Health & Science University), Christopher Chute (the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine), Kristi Holmes (Northwestern University), Sean Mooney (University of Washington) and John Wilbanks (Sage Bionetworks).

“The goal is to unlock the amazing wealth of technologies and innovation located within each individual CTSA and to create cohesive communities of practice founded on the fundamental premise that team science, data sharing and collaborative innovation can advance patient care,” said Haendel.

The CD2H will be tasked with several priorities to support a vibrant and evolving informatics ecosystem, including enhancing a collaborative informatics community; developing Good Data Practice; promoting software standards for interoperability; growing collaborative innovation across informatics tools, methods and processes; advancing cutting-edge biomedical research informatics; data science education for CTSA Program researchers; and novel methods and tools for the evaluation of the impact of these activities to enhance health care through data and informatics.

Chute, M.D., Dr. P.H., M.P.H., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Informatics, professor of medicine, chief health research information officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine and deputy director, informatics core, of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, described the important role that collaborative informatics plays in health. “All CTSA hubs have shared an aspiration for federated analyses of clinical data across the network, married with public repositories of basic science data, to achieve unprecedented levels of biomedical knowledge discovery and improved practice,” he said. “CD2H will catalyze this process and coordinate the myriad of social, legal and technical requirements to make this practical.”

The new CTSA Program, National Center for Data to Health, is supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences at the National Institutes of Health (grant U24TR002306).