? Biorepository and Clinical Data Core The need to increase participation of diverse groups in biomedical research is a national health agenda to promote equitable dissemination of the benefits of genomic medicine. Unfortunately, minority populations are underrepresented in most research, including genetic research. Our goal is to establish a data management taskforce to support the administrative management, data management, and analysis of data generated across participating institutions. We also aim to prioritize and facilitate the process by which investigators generate data sets and use phenotypes of interest to create research cohorts and access associated genetic data appropriately as it relates to health disparities research.
The Specific Aims are as follows: 1) To facilitate the efficient use of existing biospecimen and clinical data repositories for health disparities research. 2) To support health disparities research that leverages biospecimen repositories and clinical data across multiple institutions. 3) To enable the linking of biological data to clinical, contextual and environmental data for health disparities research. 4) To develop culturally informed engagement and educational activities regarding biospecimen research and data repositories. Vanderbilt is a national leader in advancing natural language processing and machine learning techniques to derive phenotypes from disparate data sources. Although it is has been repeatedly stated and painfully apparent that social and behavioral factors influence health and mortality, such determinants are often ignored in clinical practice and documentation. Since social context has been show to account for disparities in health outcomes previously attributed to race, it is essential for environmental and contextual data be controlled for in minority studies. In collaboration with the partnering institutes this core will function to support the overarching goals of the Center of Excellence in Precision Medicine and Population Health to advance research efforts and genomic data to eliminate health disparities.
