GRIN Network Shows Early Success in Big-Data Sharing

Research By: Peter White, PhD | Tracy Glauser, MD

Post Date: September 5, 2019 | Publish Date: Sept. 4, 2019

Three of the nation’s top pediatric medical centers—Cincinnati Children’s, Boston Children’s and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—report early signs of success in sharing hard-to-gather data about rare childhood diseases after launching the Genomics Research & Innovation Network (GRIN).

Details appear in a study published Sept. 4, 2019, in Genetics in Medicine.

Teams at all three hospitals worked to harmonize study consent and data management protocols through their institutional review boards (IRBs). Now, investigators can get secured access to a rapidly expanding collection of de-identified data from biobanks and related databases.

Planners have worked since 2015 to work out details and set up the shared system. The teams also launched pilot projects to demonstrate the network’s capabilities and apply them to active studies.

“Investigators at all sites enthusiastically collaborated on the pilot studies, resulting in multiple publications. Investigators have also begun to successfully utilize the infrastructure for grant applications,” the co-authors write.

Stay tuned for more details to appear on the CincyInformatix innovation blog.

Read previous coverage of the GRIN network

Publication Information

Original title:	The Genomics Research and Innovation Network: creating an interoperable, federated, genomics learning system
Published in:	Genetics in Medicine
Publish date:	Sept. 4, 2019

Read the study

Research By

Peter White, PhD

Director, Division of Biomedical Informatics

Dr. White oversees informatics research and resources at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine and Cincinnati Children's, including academic, educational, data services, technology development, and research IT missions.