NIH awards contracts for projects to improve informatics support to small clinical studies.

Healthcare IT News (1/26, Merrill) reported that NIH "has awarded three contracts for pilot projects to improve informatics support for researchers conducting small-to medium-sized clinical studies. Officials say the projects will boost how researchers communicate and aid in the discovery of new treatments for diseases." The contracts were awarded to "Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, the University of Washington in Seattle and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn." Researchers at Case Western University will "develop Physio-MIMI, an informatics infrastructure for collecting, managing and analyzing diverse data types across institutions." The University of Washington project will "develop a mechanism allowing researchers at three large, geographically distributed medical centers to easily access large shared data sets." The Vanderbilt project will "extend the capabilities of the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) system."