Shawn Murphy, MD, PhD, Professor of Neurology at MGH Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School (Secondary) and Griffin Weber, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School (Secondary)

The use of i2b2 will be illustrated in achieving high impact publications and participation in several high-profile national and international research networks to study COVID-19: (1) The Consortium for Clinical Characterization of COVID-19 by EHR (4CE) engages local experts in informatics, statistics, and clinical medicine at hospitals around the world to iteratively improve sites' data quality to gain trust in the data and to conduct rapid analyses on COVID-19 through a federated model and patient chart review. (2) Accrual to Clinical Trials (ACT) is a national federated network that connects i2b2 databases at 40+ institutions across the country, enabling researchers to access data on more than 100 million patients.

Bios:

We are currently at the beginning stages of a generation-defining revolution in biology. For the past two decades, breakthroughs in our understanding of genetics and genomics, coupled with those in AI and machine learning, have presented us with opportunities to radically improve healthcare around the world. Data is now a digital specimen, but as more and more data is collected, often in different formats and on disparate platforms, new solutions are needed to successfully integrate, store, compute, and secure data. This talk provides a short set of examples for how to handle large-scale medical studies in a secure and scalable fashion. It assesses contemporary realities, identifies potentially promising research directions, and investigates potential impact on the field of bioinformatics from a Computer Science perspective.