Building the Future of Health Informatics at the University of Iowa

Project Lead: Boyd Knosp 

Funding Approved: Fiscal Year 22
Project Status: In Progress  
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
• 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
• 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:

In the third year of the project, the IHDR team will continue to build its team of data liaisons by training another cohort of faculty and staff. Additional plans include reworking parts of the training curriculum to better fit into educational programs around campus and collaborating with faculty and staff to ensure research groups and teams are aware of the tools and services available to them.

The data team will rework the existing core data infrastructure to increase usability, sustainability, and adaptability. They will also promote multi-institutional, clinical research networks to researchers on campus.