First Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) Solutions Day: advanced IT support from EU projects for clinical trials

Abstract

Necessity for a novel form of interactive conference Clinical trials are the foundation for the advancement of medical research, but they are also complex, time consuming and expensive. To ensure scientific validity, clinical trials must record large amounts of data on health and treatment of a carefully selected group of patients or trial participants. That is why a robust and highly flexible IT infrastructure that permits rapid reconfiguration to support different trials while maintaining consistent data models is needed to ensure that clinical data can be shared and used for analysis. Recently, EU projects, like TRANSFoRm, p-medicine, EHR4CR and BioMedBridges, are creating advanced clinical research information systems consisting of sets of tools that assist in the preparation and conduct of clinical trials and the re-use of care data for research purposes. These tools are also able to assemble data from heterogeneous sources to answer complex research questions, including functions for data mining and support of research process workflows to meet the needs of translational and personalized medical research [1]. Because the translation of biomedical discoveries into clinical applications is an aim of the EU Commission, clinical research support is expected to be a major component of EU funded projects [2]. In this context, the EU Framework Program 7 (FP7, http://ec.europa.eu/ research/fp7/index_en.cfm) has promoted translational research, the so-called ‘from bench-to-bedside’ approach, that is expected to have practical benefits and improvements of the quality of life for patients. In this context, it is planned that many of the tools developed in ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) and IMI projects will be used by ECRIN, the European Clinical Research Infrastructures Network [3] to advance clinical trials. To provide information on these new research tools and to evaluate their usability for the clinical research community, the CRI Solutions Day was organised by ECRIN together with other EUfunded projects (TRANSFoRm, EHR4CR, p-medicine, BioMedBridges and ECRIN-IA) providing interactive “hands-on” sessions to allow visitors to see these tools in action. The necessity for such a solutions day was based on the experience of ECRIN that the conventional, class room style presentation of research tools is not sufficient to demonstrate comparability and usability to many researchers. Thus, presenters from academia, research infrastructures and EU projects presented their developments with interactive sessions embedded in a framework of presentations and joint discussions. The CRI solutions day took place at Heinrich-Heine University Dusseldorf, in Dusseldorf, Germany, 26-27 May 2014.