USING R TO ADVANCE PATIENT-CENTRIC RESEARCH IN THE STUDY OF A PROSPECTIVE ADULT RESEARCH COHORT

Abstract

IBD Plexus is a data exchange platform that houses four cohorts, including The Study of a Prospective Adult Research Cohort with IBD (SPARC IBD). SPARC IBD is a multicentered, longitudinal cohort that follows patients through their standard of care. In IBD Plexus, patient reported data (eCRF) is linked with clinical and electronic medical record (EMR) data. Biospecimens are continuously collected and have been used to generate a myriad of molecular and biomarker data. To facilitate inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) research, we built an R package ‘ibdplexus’ (https://github.com/ccf-tfehlmann/ibdplexus), with multiple functions to load, filter and subset the data in IBD Plexus. Currently, this R package focuses primarily on SPARC IBD, with a future goal to expand to incorporate other studies. Each function is designed to help understand an IBD patient’s journey including their treatment use and disease activity over time.