The integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia (iTHRIV) program is a collaboration of public and private institutions across the Commonwealth of Virginia that brings team science, innovation, and a commitment to train the next generation of clinical and translational researchers. Our three iTHRIV partners include University of Virginia (Central VA), Virginia Tech Carilion (Southwestern VA) and Inova Health Systems (Northern VA). Our two iTHRIV affiliates are the Center for Open Science and the Licensing and Ventures Group in Charlottesville. A particular strength of iTHRIV lies in integrating data science approaches through all aspects of clinical translational research in order to speed discovery and improve the health of our communities. iTHRIV has a central tenant that serves as the organizing principle: health care solutions are hidden in underutilized data. Our overall goal is to deepen the iTHRIV infrastructure to support clinical translational research to benefit the diverse rural and urban populations that iTHRIV member clinicians serve. The unified approach across the components of this CTSA application is to integrate data and data analytics to accelerate and streamline scientific workflows for clinical trials, innovative therapeutic advancements, and the creation of more personalized approaches to healthcare. Data science is a particular strength of our team and will allow us to transform our cross-state informatics infrastructure by creating The Commons, a scalable research hosting platform shared by iTHRIV partners that will serve as the foundation for our informatics support. It will provide the infrastructure for the Research Concierge Services, the human and electronic approach to supporting clinical translational research. This platform will combine data-centered approaches to discovery by hosting and sharing datasets, applications, and other research objects with a human-centered approach to design and systems architecture. The Commons is designed to serve both as a technical framework and an approach to establishing processes and tools necessary to enable data sharing between partner locations. The Concierge service informs and connects researchers to training, support services and compliance resources to streamline the clinical translational research process. The mission of iTHRIV, through the Commons and the Concierge Services, is to remove barriers to discovery in Virginia and beyond. The iTHRIV Commons is conceptually similar to the NIH Data Commons, and the implementation of this framework across partner sites will remove barriers to data access and other research objects (algorithms, best practices, etc.), while enforcing compliance in the secure use of data. iTHRIV will marry the expertise of our world class data science teams in The Commons to our outstanding clinical translational researchers in order to uncover health care solutions.
The integrated Translational Health Research Institute of Virginia (iTHRIV) is a network of researchers and community partners across Virginia who are focused on looking at research and health data in novel ways to improve the health and well-being of people from diverse backgrounds and geographic locations. iTHRIV is a central place where researchers and community members can come together to share ideas with the goal of transforming health care.