Building the Future of Health Informatics at the University of Iowa

Project Lead: Boyd Knosp 

Funding Approved: Fiscal Year 22
Project Status: Complete (Re-funded for Fiscal Year 25)  
Funded amount: $2.2M over three years

The Iowa Health Data Resource (IHDR) project aims to improve how the University of Iowa research community accesses and utilizes health science data. The IHDR will serve as a foundation for future health informatics research and position Iowa as a national competitor in building interdisciplinary programs for next-generation research, curriculum, and student-engaged research development.

In the first two years of the project, IHDR was able to improve delivery times for data requests with the help of the intercollegiate advisory and implementation team and new staff positions while also defining a standard process for developing transformative datasets.

Activities to date:

• Created and trained an intercollegiate advisory and implementation team to improve access to Iowa health data for researchers
  • Team provides training and mentorship to data liaisons across the university
  • Offered new training on medical record searches and analytics tools
  • Developing a new training on subject recruitment  
• Established a framework for building transformative datasets, which has enabled the start-up of two new datasets and the evolution of another into a knowledgebase
  • New datasets can map patient distances from health systems throughout the state
• Designed, purchased, and a data enclave that provides a secure and compliant computational environment for processing patient data extracts containing protected health information
• Improved access to Iowa health data for UI research community
  • Training and mentoring of data liaisons has had a significant impact on the delivery of complex data sets for researchers
  • Training curriculum has received positive feedback
• Supported three grant proposals, 13 research abstracts or posters, three papers, three funded grants
• Supported external data requests through development of new data governance processes 

Next steps:

The IHDR team made significant progress in helping the university increase access to health science data for research. The team developed and trained data liaison's across campus, built new datasets, and secured grants to fund positions on the IHDR team. The team continues to advise on grant applications, collaborate on multi-institutional projects, and deliver data to researchers through service requests. The project was re-funded in FY 2025 to complete training, achieve sustainability in dataset development, and continue work in rural health data, social determinants of health, and cancer informatics.