HARNESSING CLINICAL RESEARCH INFORMATICS TO SUPPORT CLINICAL DECISION MAKING

The high variation in workflows and processes in biomedical research, most notably clinical trials, has been identified as a significant contributor to the inefficiency of the clinical trials process, and thus to the “pipeline problem” in the delivery of new therapies and the slowness of “knowledge turns” in biomedicine.  In order to speed the delivery of new therapies to patients, government agencies, clinical research sponsors and biomedical data standards bodies have made a concerted effort to formulate standardized, structured data representations of clinical trials.  This presentation describes these efforts and the fruits they have borne, and explores how the latter could form the basis of standardized, structured data representations of treatment guidelines and thus to an automated process for supplying content to clinical decision support systems.