Showing posts with label AMIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AMIA. Show all posts

Thursday, January 26, 2017

American Medical Informatics Association considers data sharing plan for clinical research

The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) has submitted comments on an intended data access and data sharing plan that the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute released in the time period of late 2016.

PCORI is an independent agency authorized by Congress in the year of 2010 that funds clinical effectiveness research to assist healthcare stakeholders to make informed health decisions. These involve clinicians, patients, employers, insurers and policymakers.

In its comments, American Medical Informatics Association recommended PCORI consider needing a preliminary data sharing plan as part of the award application. The agency representing healthcare informatics experts also called for earmarking particular amounts of grant funds to support data preparation and curation.

In its request for comment, PCORI laid out expectations for researchers granted funding to reproduce genuine analyses to maximize the integrity of findings and promote data sharing to enable conduct of extra analyses, AMIA contends in its comments.

“The data access and sharing is significant and foundational to advance and modern scientific discovery,” claims AMIA President and CEO Doug Fridsma, MD. The PCORI plan, he added, will make sure that comparative effectiveness research adds to evidence-based medicine while tearing down data silos.

Other AMIA suggestions to PCORI involve defining metadata that includes requisite attributes and vocabularies utilized to give attributes as an explicit component of the Analyzable Data Set; motivating use of emerging community metadata models; and developing ways to ensure data originators get credit for their work. The PCORI request for comment is available here.

 

Friday, January 20, 2017

Why interoperability is a significant component for improving research?

Interoperability is considered to be a significant component for improving research and the capability of healthcare investigators to acquire improvements, claims one of the nation’s greatest healthcare IT organizations.

That is among the comments submitted by the American Medical Informatics Association, known as AMIA, for ways to compel researchers to make better the sharing of their work.

The National Institutes of Health, which is the nation’s medical research agency, in the month of November released a request for information on strategies for standardizing how the agency handles data, cites shared data and software, and makes findings and conclusions publicly available.

“Data sharing has become such a vital proximal output of research that we consider the relative value of a proposed project should involve consideration of how its information will be shared,” AMIA stated in its comments. “By utilizing the peer-review procedure, we’ll make incremental improvements to interoperability while recognizing approaches to better data sharing practices over time.”

Interoperability is the key to better sharing of research, claims Jeffrey Smith, vice president of public policy at AMIA. “The purpose is to make sure that whatever data is utilized and created toward results of research will be available for secondary use and reanalysis and reproducibility.”

In the past year, the Cancer Moonshot Initiative championed by Vice President Joe Biden and the Precision Medicine Initiative has put a spotlight on how siloed research data can be, Smith elaborates. Now, the NIH is attempting to break down the silos.

“We can leverage computer speeds and storage at levels not possible a decade ago,” Smith asserts. “Still we’ve very some institutional ways to applaud the worth of data sets and software.”

Subsequently, the NIH RFI concentrates on data management and sharing strategies to make sure that data generated in public research is made available and accurately cited. The NIH initiative, Smith considers, also will shine a spotlight on how some clinical trial agencies actually deposit their data into the NIH clinicaltrials.gov web site.

When researchers submit applications for government grant-supported projects, NIH convenes professionals to analyze and score the projects to evaluate overall quality of the application. The application must have a sharing component, but that component isn’t part of the overall scoring procedure, in accordance to Smith, who calls it “a check-the-box exercise.” interoperability is a significant component for improving research.

Subsequently, AMIA advocates that a plan to share data should be scored during the expert review procedure of grant applications. “Making it scorable means you’ve to spend time and attention on data sharing,” Smith claims, while appreciating this would be a new and key step for researchers for improving research. “Few researchers are not well-versed in collecting, handling and sharing data.”