A Weill Cornell Medicine-led database of greater than 15 million patients has received near $8 million in renewed funding from the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to expand the database and its use for health research for the subsequent three years.
The INSIGHT Clinical Research Network is a group of de-identified electronic health records and clinical trials data from the five top academic medical centers in Latest York City, centralized into one database. The collaboration has enabled a recent level of city-wide data sharing, fostering research that gives insights on health care quality and price, provision of health services, and relationships between health outcomes and social determinants of health, resembling housing, employment and access to health services.
“INSIGHT is propelling data science forward and allowing us to harness an in depth amount of clinical information from all features of the patient experience to enhance health care,” said Dr. Rainu Kaushal, principal investigator of INSIGHT, senior associate dean of clinical research and chair of the Department of Population Health Sciences. “This renewed funding will enable us to maximise our capabilities to perform groundbreaking research, and proceed to take care of and expand this high-quality, comprehensive resource for researchers nationwide.”
The INSIGHT consortium is led by Weill Cornell Medicine and includes Columbia University Irving Medical Center, Montefiore Health System, Mount Sinai Health System, NYU Langone Health and NewYork-Presbyterian. It’s one among eight clinical research networks across the country which can be supporting PCORnet®, the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network, with funding from the independent, non-profit research funding organization PCORI.
INSIGHT was established in 2013 with a $7 million grant and has been renewed once already. In the primary phases, Weill Cornell Medicine and its consortium collaborators arrange the network’s secure, cloud-based system and a governance body that features patients, who contribute ideas for recruitment, research questions, and the way studies are designed and communicated to communities.
The INSIGHT database has generated over $100 million in research funding for the network’s member institutions, involved lots of of researchers from the consortium partners and is accessible to researchers across the country.
Currently, with a $9.8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health, INSIGHT is co-leading the “RECOVER PCORnet Adult Initiative to Use Real World and Electronic Health Record (EHR) Data to Study Post-Acute SARS CoV-2 Syndrome (PASC),” a nationwide consortium of greater than 40 health care institutions analyzing EHR data to detect, predict, treat and stop long COVID. The study seeks to leverage patient-driven data to deal with fundamental scientific questions, resembling the disease manifestations over time and the susceptibility of certain populations to adversarial outcomes.
From large nationwide efforts like RECOVER to local studies conducted by junior researchers, INSIGHT uses an modern approach to meaningful engage with various stakeholders, including patients, their caregivers and families, in addition to clinicians and researchers. The Accelerator Model, a multi-stakeholder engagement strategy that integrates and embeds patients and stakeholders into every dimension of INSIGHT infrastructure and research, fosters collaboration and a shared vision across scientific and non-scientific communities.
“This model has been essential to the network’s development of modern solutions to reply pressing research questions and address health disparities,” Dr. Kaushal said.
The renewal will support studies of artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing of health data to help in health decision-making, in addition to studies on the long-term effects of COVID-19. It would also enable more pragmatic clinical trials, research studies on a health intervention already in place in a real-world setting.
“Health care may be very fragmented, especially in Latest York City,” said Andrea Cohen, INSIGHT’s project director. “To be able to understand the impact of health care on patients and speed up the pace of quality research, we’d like to bring together data from many sources and make it widely accessible.”