CIBMTR

Marrow and Blood Cell Transplant Research Leaders Awarded $2 Million to Improve Data Sharing

Improved methods for standardized data exchange between physicians, transplant centers and research data repositories will begin to speed the delivery of research results to improve patient outcomes under a $2 million contract from the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute awarded to the National Marrow Donor Program^® (NMDP) and its research partner, the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research^TM (CIBMTR.)

The funding, awarded under the National Institute of Health (NIH) initiative "Roadmap Re-Engineering the Clinical Research Enterprise¹," will support doctors and information specialists from the NMDP in Minneapolis and the CIBMTR in Milwaukee to develop a public system for electronic exchange of clinical network transplantation data.

This effort will result in:

• Increasing data exchange activities between multiple clinical networks supporting marrow and blood cell transplantation
• Increasing participation by hospitals and physicians and facilitating easy entry of patient and investigator participation in studies and trials
• Developing new approaches and tools for electronic data exchange and improved communications and participation among transplant centers, physicians and researchers

"An important aspect of this proposal is its open-source spirit - all work developed under this project will be made publicly available to facilitate adoption, adaptation, extension and improvement in all data exchange," said Dennis Confer, M.D., NMDP chief medical officer and grant co-administrator. "The major strength of this plan is combining clinical and scientific skills with bioinformatics knowledge to establish a protocol for exchanging information about transplant recipients and their experiences."

"This contract demonstrates the synchronization achieved when the NMDP and the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry (IBMTR) combined their research efforts to create the CIBMTR," said Mary Horowitz, M.D., scientific director of CIBMTR and co-principal investigator on the project.

The project team, while maintaining the privacy of protected health information and the confidentiality of patients, will focus on:

• Implementing clinical data exchange and extending it across the network of hospitals, researchers and physicians in the NMDP and the CIBMTR networks
• Extending the implementation of data exchange to include an international marrow and blood cell transplant registry for a more thorough study range
• Implementing a robust electronic messaging system, which is secure, accurate and readily adaptable
• Developing acceptable guidelines for exchanging diverse clinical data

¹ Contract No. HHSN2682004252115C