Patient data mined for study set-up

Systematic protocol development is the goal of a collaboration between the Mayo Clinic and Centerphase, a clinical service provider. The effort targets protocol evaluation and optimization specifically.

The Mayo Clinic will tap its HIPAA-compliant Enterprise Data Trust--comprising data on 7 million patients, culled from health records, education, and research and administrative systems--and provide Centerphase with de-identified patient information (see related story [1]). Centerphase will perform protocol review and optimization and help identify Mayo patients who qualify for clinical trials.  

The massive patient database bears a conceptual similarity to BioVU, the newly available Vanderbilt University DNA databank reported earlier [2]. It comprises de-identified biological samples from 75,000 individuals, linked with electronic medical records. BioVU is being used to study how DNA variations may be used as an indicator of patient response to medicines.

Of the Mayo Clinic collaboration, Centerphase says in a release that it hopes to extend the model to additional academic medical centers and healthcare networks.

- see the release [3]

Related Articles:
DNA databank marries bio samples and EMRs [2]
Software culls insurance claims for subjects [4]