Resources
Case Study: NCI Enterprise Services
Client
National Cancer Institute's (NCI) Center for Biomedical Informatics and Information Technology (CBIIT)
Background
The National Cancer Institute's cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG®) is the world’s largest biomedical research highway. This open-source information network enables all constituencies in the cancer community—researchers, physicians, and patients—to share data and knowledge. The power and promise of the caBIG initiative lies in collaboration, which in the clinical trials space manifested a challenge: with thousands of researchers engaged in caBIG projects—all using various software—how do you manage the data?
Challenge
The suite of caBIG applications that serve the clinical trial community is extensive and growing. Many of these tools reference and share the same information. For instance, researchers may register their studies using one piece of software, track patient calendars with another, and report adverse events with a third. As the number of caBIG applications increased, so did the need for a repository of commonly referenced information. Such a repository would allow application developers and researchers to pull information from a single location. Software developers then wouldn’t have to write duplicative code, and software users wouldn’t have to enter the same information in multiple places.
5AM worked with NCI’s top architectural team to design an enterprise web service that would provide a canonical source of commonly referenced information. Data that researchers commonly reference in clinical trials applications include organizations (research institutions), people (investigators and patients), and protocols (treatments), and the relationships between and among those entities. The resulting web services began with the name COPPA (Correlation of Organizations, People, Protocol Abstraction) and evolved to NCI Enterprise Services (NES). With its experience in executing usable and useful software from complex requirements, 5AM was selected to lead the people, organization, and correlation efforts.
Process
NCI Enterprise Services (NES) began as a complex undertaking involving numerous internal and external stakeholders—from the systems requiring or providing information, to the NCI CTO, to the caBIG teams themselves. This endeavor also required synchronous efforts from multiple developers working as an integrated team.
5AM’s team engaged the various stakeholders to understand requirements that sometimes seemed to be at tension. The strong enterprise vision at times conflicted with the ease of use preferred by application developers who would be using the enterprise services. Working with these stakeholders, 5AM struck the right balance so that the web services could both meet the long-term needs of the enterprise and still be usable and implementable by its consumers.
5AM employed a truly standards-based approach in developing and implementing NES, using HL7 RIM and ISO 21090 datatypes, both accepted as national standards. NES is the first NCI CBITT project to fully embrace HL7 V3 RIM semantics. It is also, to our knowledge, the first project in the world to use ISO 21090 datatypes for all attributes in its system. By pushing the envelope of standards-based implementation, NES is taking important step toward interoperability in healthcare.
Result
Offering a federated web services for all applications across the caBIG network, NCI Enterprise Services is helping researchers, application developers, and NCI realize massive savings. With multiple software applications drawing data from NES, researchers can enter information about a patient in one application and know that the same information will be available to other applications. Similarly, when a researcher modifies information on that patient in one application, those changes will be seen in other applications. For scientists, NES is eliminating redundancy, freeing time and resources for analysis and collaboration, activities that generate research breakthroughs. NES is saving time for application developers, too, providing them with core services that remove the need to write the same code for each new application. Developers can now create software to serve the needs of researchers with more efficiency and speed, resulting in cost savings for NCI.
NES is broadening the reach of caBIG by providing core services that save time for researchers and developers. With common datatypes now accessible across applications, NES is bringing the NCI closer to achieving the mission of caBIG as a truly collaborative information network—one that accelerates the discovery of new approaches to detect, diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer, and ultimately, improve patient outcomes.
More information
Project information: http://gforge.nci.nih.gov/projects/coppa/ and https://wiki.nci.nih.gov/display/CTRP/COPPA+Core+Services.
The COPPA web application for the management of persons, organizations, and protocols is only available internally at NCI. However, see the links above to download the source code and for more information.
Contact
5AM Solutions
www.5amsolutions.com
info@5amsolutions.com
866-526-6042