An area of CHIP pioneering innovation is federated networks, a practice which enables decentralized approaches to data distributed across sites. From our faculty’s earliest forays into the field with the Shared Pathology Information Network (The NCI funded “Napster for pathology samples”) to the first demonstration of federated research networks for biosurveillance, to development of the Shared Health Research Innovation Network (SHRINE) network.
Our program has worked with sister academic medical institutions to establish globally scalable technology, policies and procedures for sharing genomic, phenotypic and biospecimen data on broadly consented cohorts, across sites of care. We have, in partnership with our sister sites, developed two federated data sharing commons, the Genomic Research and Innovation Network (GRIN) and the Genomic Information Commons (GIC). Our faculty have developed the first query portal in the world that provides a uniform interface that enables users to retrieve genomic data, phenotypic data and biospecimen metadata in a single query. The technology, policies, and procedures that we have developed enable us to acquire additional partners and scale our federated data sharing globally.
Projects
Inspired by a common vision of accelerated genomic discovery, collaboration, and improved clinical outcomes, leaders at Boston Children's Hospital, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Washington University at St. Louis, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have come together to create the Genomic Information Commons (GIC). The GIC is an NCATS-funded, multi-institutional, federated, genomic data commons.
Three of the nation’s leading children’s hospitals launched the Genomic Research and Innovation Network (GRIN), with federated information technology infrastructure, harmonized biobanking protocols, and material transfer agreements. Harmonized, broadly consented institutional review board (IRB) protocols were approved and used for biobank enrollment, creating ever- expanding, compatible biobanks. An open source federated query infrastructure was established over genotype–phenotype databases at the three hospitals. Investigators securely access the GRIN platform for prep to research queries, receiving aggregate counts of patients with particular phenotypes or genotypes in each biobank.
4CE is an international consortium for electronic health record data-driven studies of the COVID-19 pandemic. The goal of this effort—led by the i2b2 international academics users group—is to inform doctors, epidemiologists and the public about COVID-19 patients with data acquired through the health care process.
Cumulus is a federally funded project to leverage to use cloud-hosted electronic health record “side cars” leveraging regulated open standards APIs to enable federation of data across all sites of care. By 2016, CHIP had implemented one of the world’s first HIPAA compliant cloud instances. AWS, Microsoft and Google have all implemented CHIP’s SMART/FHIR APIs in their products.
