CTSI was recently awarded funding from the 2023 Research Infrastructure Investment Program. Funded by the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR), the program awards matched funding to projects that support transdisciplinary research and collaboration across the University of Minnesota’s colleges and campuses. The awards are designed to facilitate interdisciplinary partnerships and strengthen the University’s research infrastructure.
The Clinical Research 360 (CR360) initiative, led by CTSI, addresses gaps in integrated operational data availability for senior leaders, PIs, departments, and centers. The new data repository will leverage information from many administrative applications to provide three new institutional capabilities:
- Integrated data and analytics for clinical trial progress assessments for investigators, study teams, participants, funders and U of M leadership.
- Data feeds to fuel existing and new IT applications, such as metric dashboards and study tracking tools for more efficiency.
- Data for informaticians to use predictive analytics for advancing the science of how clinical research is conducted.
“The CR360 project is already off to a strong start, having achieved three important milestones in 2022,” said CTSI Deputy Director Daniel Weisdorf, MD, who is the PI on the award. “When the project is completed, the reporting infrastructure will accurately identify PIs, departments, and centers that do well with certain functions so that their success may be easier to replicate. It will also identify areas to improve and indicate those that need help, allowing CTSI to understand which services to extend and where to focus to best serve the research mission.”
An additional benefit of the CR360 project is the ability to measure and improve data quality through an increased ability to compare data between applications, data transparency, and new formal data documentation processes. The resulting data repository will provide the capability to deliver institutionally accepted and defined “source of truth” reports and data sets for a wide range of uses.
The OVPR award, along with matching funds from OACA, will be used to directly fund the staffing costs to build out the CR360 governance model, dashboards, data delivery, and management of the data repository.