Collaborative Infrastructures for Health-Care Research

Pursuing the healthcare research roadmap requires integrative efforts among multiple organizations and initiatives.  The culture of research has shifted to team science, distributed research programs, and distributed analytical resources such as gene sequencers and colliders.  This means that teams of investigators must be able to collaboratively find each other, submit joint grants, administer research programs, share files and data, access instrumentation and workflows, and publish results. For health researchers there are further complications with regulated data such as electronic protected health information in, for example, clinical trials.  This presentation will explore several examples of how HUBzero has been deployed to support healthcare research and practice.   The Indiana CTSI HUB represents an institution-scale medical research virtual organization for the state of Indiana, including Indiana University, Purdue University, and the University of Notre Dame.  It supports virtual clinical research teams, community engaged research, research program development, and industry and public outreach.  The tools developed for the Indiana CTSI HUB include federated identity support, automated ontology annotation of content, applications that support user-driven multi-institutional file sharing, clinical research data management, volunteer recruitment, and industry partnership for technology transfer.  The Cancer Care Engineering HUB is a project-scale virtual organization that supports a multi-team investigation of colorectal cancer and other clinical projects.  It centralizes data, and supports a workflow, for 6 teams at the IU School of Medicine and Purdue University that collect and ship clinical tissue samples, undertake mass spectrometry analysis, visualize data, and undertake statistical analysis.  Because the data are housed centrally and easily accessibly through HUB web interfaces, it has resulted in a marked acceleration in the research team’s workflow and research outcomes.