Biomedical Informatics Resource (BMIR)

The Biomedical Informatics Resource (BMIR) provides informatics services to investigators and conducts original informatics research in the basic and applied translational domains.

Services

BMIR provides support through:

Research

BMIR develops methods and software to understand and to address the information needs of clinical investigators, clinical study participants, and clinical research coordinators with regards to clinical trial recruitment, clinical data access, and interdisciplinary team science. Our past research results include IMPACT, Criteria2Query, and eTACTs.

An important resource for BMIR is our Integrated Model for Patient Care and Clinical Trials (IMPACT) Research Scheduling System. IMPACT is a software system designed to automate the manual steps required to schedule research visits for clinical trial participants and thus increase efficiency and reduce errors. IMPACT maintains a real-time database of resources and their availability, such as exam rooms, equipment, and people (investigators, coordinators, phlebotomists, and schedulers). IMPACT facilitates communication among study and scheduling staff by sending them notifications of new, rescheduled, and canceled visits and, daily, weekly, and monthly quantitative activity reports.

IMPACT is also able to audit historical appointments, track patient attributes, and make notes of irregular events during visits. This technology will be further developed into a suite of applications that will facilitate other aspects of the research process for schedulers, coordinators, administrators, and investigators. Future functionality could include appointment reminders, adverse event reporting, external calendar synchronization, niche market customization, etc. IMPACT also interfaces directly with WebCAMP, a clinical research database, to easily acquire participant, study, and research staff information.

Lead Inventor: Chunhua Weng, PhD, FCMI

This work has been published in the Journal of Biomedical Informatics.

Leadership

Chunhua Weng, PhD
- Co-Director; Professor of Biomedical Informatics
Soumitra Sengupta, PhD
- Co-Director; Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics at CUIMC
Karthik Natarajan, PhD
- Co-Director; Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics at CUIMC
Aristidis Floratos, PhD
- Associate Professor of Systems Biology and Biomedical Informatics at CUIMC; Executive Research Director, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Peter A. Sims, PhD
- Director, Columbia Single Cell Analysis Core; Director, Systems Biology Graduate Studies
Linda Busacca
- Program Manager
Amritha Menon
- BRIDGE Technology Manager