NYC Health Systems Get $7M To Share Data

Seven New York City health systems have gotten a delayed Christmas present — a $7 million grant designed to encourage data sharing initiatives and improve patient recruitment for clinical trials. The primary goal of the project is to use evidence-based research to help patients make good decisions about their healthcare.

The funding comes from a group known as the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, or PCORI. PCORI, which will create a clinical data research network in NYC, has already created 29 such networks across the nation, according to Healthcare IT News.

These networks, collectively, will form PCORnet, a $93.5 million patient-centered research initiative. The New York City Clinical Data Research Network (NYC-CDRN), a  consortium of 22 regional organizations, will work together to develop systems supporting data networking efforts and advance patient-centered research, Healthcare IT News reports.

NYC-CDRN will kick off their efforts by identifying patients with diabetes, obesity and cystic fibrosis. It will then partner with patients and clinicians by creating disease-specific community groups.

The NYC-CDRN network will connect medical records for 6 million New York City residents, then anonymize the records, and over the next 18 months, will work to standardize the data. Ultimately, the goal is to allow patients and providers to have access to evidence-based information they can use to make smart healthcare choices.

This should be an interesting project to watch over the next year and a half. PCORI is doing a lot of forward-thinking work with its money, including $5 million to the NIH for a tool called PROMIS designed to help with comparative effectiveness research. PROMIS has existed since 2004, but PCORI is now helping it move forward, making the $5 million in funds available  in research grants up to $500,000 for projects up to two years in length.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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