A partnership facilitated by the Translational Research Institute (TRI) gives UAMS faculty new opportunities to lead and join a range of impactful research projects as part of a federally supported network of institutions.
The network, OneFlorida+ PCORnet is a clinical research network overseen by the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute. In addition to UAMS, its institutional partners are in Alabama, Georgia and California.
PCORnet is a national resource supported by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI). It offers the kind of research ecosystem that has long been pursued: a fully integrated network where vast, highly representative health data, research expertise, and patient insights are built-in and accessible from the very start, according to the PCORnet website.
The OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Network spans 20 million patients, 4,100 providers, 1,240 practices, 14 academic institutions and 22 hospitals. It consists of two main components: a) the OneFlorida+ Data Trust, which contains curated and cleaned data using the PCORnet Common Data Model (CDM); and b) the Practice-Based research Network, which allows researchers to conduct pragmatic clinical trials and other interventional studies in research-ready clinics.
“OneFlorida+ is an amazing opportunity to engage in research regionally and expand UAMS’ clinical research footprint,” said Mathias Brochhausen, Ph.D., TRI associate director for Strategic Collaborations and a professor in the College of Medicine Department of Biomedical Informatics. “OneFlorida+ also gives us access to a very well curated set of de-identified patient data.”
Brochhausen is one of two UAMS principal investigators for PCORnet, serving as the research lead. UAMS’ Ahmad Baghal, M.D., Ph.D., is also a principal investigator and serves as the technical lead. He is director of the TRI-supported Arkansas Clinical Data Repository (AR-CDR).
Brochhausen recently initiated a day-long meeting at UAMS with the OneFlorida+ PCORnet leaders. The meeting included a morning session with TRI leadership and an afternoon session included a broader group of research faculty from across UAMS.
“The meeting really launched our efforts to begin sharing this amazing opportunity with our colleagues here,” Brochhausen said. “We are receiving emails every week about other PCORnet sites searching for collaborators, so we want our research community and potential PIs to be aware of that opportunity. It could really be a massive accelerator for research in the institution.”