The Rheumatology Informatics Core (RIC, Informatics Core) provides biomedical informatics expertise and infrastructure to the Cincinnati Rheumatic Diseases Resource Center (CRDRC) Research Community at the Cincinnati Children's Research Foundation (CCRF) of Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC), and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine (UCCOM). Research data management and bioinformatics analyses are essential components of rheumatology research programs at CCRF and UC, especially as data streams from next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies combined with biomaterial tracking, laboratory data and medical records data have increased. Investigators have learned to rely on easy, secure access to curated, reliable clinical and genomic data, as well as analysis tools. Access to informatics expertise through the Informatics Core will continue to enable the Research Community to undertake large-scale, multi-institutional, data and processing-intensive research projects. While Informatics Core staff contribute their own background and expertise, they also see themselves as facilitators of access to the larger pool of informatics expertise at the institution (including the Division of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) and the Center for Autoimmune Genetics and Etiology (CAGE)). Thus, the Informatics Core is the Research Community's gateway to state-of-the-art biomedical informatics support. The principal functions of the RIC are: ? To provide research data management expertise and tools for the Research Community. This includes support for next generation sequencing (Exome, Whole-Genome and RNAseq) data and management, as well as design and implementation of clinical research data acquisition tools which will provide the Rheumatology Research Community with a single, unified query interface for data in the Epic Electronic Medical Record System, the Biomaterials Tracking and Management (BTM) System, the REDCap Electronic Data Capture System as well as the in-house CCHMC Variant Knowledgebase.. ? To develop innovative, web-based informatics solutions and bioinformatics expertise to facilitate integrative analysis of genomic data, including NGS data. The RIC will build synergistically on CCHMC's Center for Pediatric Genomics (CpG) iniative, which is implementing software infrastructure to manage, process and interpret genomic variant information from NGS data. Furthermore, the RIC will continue its partnership with Dr. Mario Medvedovic at the University of Cincinnati to provide state-of-the-art analysis methodology for single cell RNAseq data. The availability of the unique resource of the Informatics Core is essential to enabling definitive genomic and clinical studies necessary to understand and define childhood rheumatic diseases.
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