While the vast amount of clinical data at Children's Hospital offers a rich opportunity to our researchers, it cannot be efficiently harvested and accurately interpreted without precise understanding of what the data represents relative to the care delivery process.

The Clinical Reporting Unit (CRU) acts as a reference librarian for data captured in the aggregate electronic health record (EHR) used in the primary care network.

Services Provided:
The CRU provides the following services:

• Data extraction from a variety of the Hospital's biomedical databases
• Data delivery in a number of formats (flat files, "mini-databases," etc.)
• General interpretation of data anomalies, clinical practice effects on the data, etc.
• Consultation to help frame researcher hypotheses or research goals

Important note: All services are subject to verification that the requestor should be granted access to the data based on IRB and HIPAA constraints that may govern such access.

All of these services can be accessed by contacting us.

Data extraction from a variety of the Hospital's biomedical databases: Biomedical data at Children's Hospital is complex, given the number of different medical situations that arise during our patients' pediatric medical "lifetimes."

As a specialty organization, the CRU is well-suited to employ the knowledge required to properly navigate through aggregate records that are essential to research.

The CRU is intimately knowledgeable of the three fundamental elements involved in efficient and highly relevant data extraction for research purposes:

Our highly trained and diverse staff allow for this level of service. Click here to learn more about our experience in accessing meaningful clinical data.

Data delivery in a number of available formats:

• Tab-delimited or comma-delimited flat files
• Standard Microsoft Office file types
• PDF files
• Simplified, derivative databases such as Access or MySQL
• We can also integrate data into an existing database that the researcher may have compiled

The last two options are highly powerful, as they allow researchers to locally house a database of relevant fields and records for their research. Simple queries can also be customized to allow the researcher different views of this data.

General interpretation of data anomalies and insight into how clinical practice has affected the data: We provide a complete overview of not only what data is captured, but also how it is captured in the context of outpatient medical practice. We attempt to explain the data's value as well as its possible limitations. Because data is entered at the point of care, there is occasionally some variability in completeness or consistencies among practices. While we try to control for these factors when they occur, we cannot change what has been captured, or add meaning when data is missing.

For examples of ways the data reflects practice and can be used to identify anomalies, please consult our reporting examples.

Consultation to help frame researcher hypotheses or research goals: Our initial consultation with a researcher will involve a discussion of the hypotheses or goals of the research and the types of patients, inclusion and exclusion criteria, and response variables that are appropriate for the study.

The initial consultation is critical to a successful delivery of relevant results. While the researcher explains the project, CRU representatives use their in-depth knowledge of the database schema and the clinical practices represented therein. The CRU representatives ask a variety of questions that may seem strange or even fairly obvious to the researcher, but the answers to these questions dictate decision points that the CRU will employ in working through the database schema to produce the optimal query.