Six senior investigators of the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine are presently supported by NIH research funds for seven major investigations totalling $4,602,225. Several other faculty are active research collaborators in other NIH-supported projects totalling $887,901. In addition, eight peer-reviewed non-NIH studies amounting to an additional $1,228,144 are being conducted in the Department. The Department's Health Data Management Center (HDMC) provides the methodologic design, data entry, programming and statistical analysis services for most of the epidemiological and social science-based research projects conducted at UMAB, both those supported by NIH grants and others. Although HDMC staff have developed a variety of software packages to facilitate computer-related management and analysis of NIH-funded and other research investigations, the present system is grossly inadequate in five respects: accessibility, cost, speed, machine configuration and integration. In order to correct this situation, and to provide the Department's NIH-supported biomedical investigators with a substantially improved computer-based system for managing and analyzing health research data, a state-of-the-art health data management system is proposed. The system is designed to serve the needs of epidemiology-based NIH-supported research projects in five ways. It will provide: a fast, highly functional and stable resource for data entry. It will support on-line storage, maintenance of large research data bases and enhancement of investigator accessibility to the data. It will communicate more effectively with the UMAB Computer Center and will offer integrated, user-friendly word processing support permitting investigators to create and merge texts with analytical results. Finally, it will support the analysis of postdoctoral research and previously funded biomedical research projects in a cost-effective manner.
