The NIH Office of the Director-funded grant “Iron-CLAD: securely advancing All of Us participant characterization with proven platforms and collaborations” (Dr. Melissa Haendel, PI) has been transferred to UNC Genetics.
Many investigators across UNC (representing TraCS, Epidemiology, Sheps Center, SILS, SDSS, and Medicine) are involved. This $19M Other Transaction (OT) award has focused on design and implement a data collection, linkage, and integration strategy that lays a foundation for a variety of All of Us data linkages for identified, and de-identified data integration, including person-level linkages such as with mortality, residential history, and administrative claims, and geocoded data pipelines to enable linkages with the Environmental Justice Index. The CLAD will acquire and process new data linkages and geocoded data in a cloud-based Data Linkage Platform (DLP), guided by the team’s experience formulating researcher-ready datasets with scientific utility. The CLAD team will perform data quality assurance, repair, and standardization checks to ensure accuracy and robustness of data-driven research. This endeavor will align data with interoperability standards and clinical terminologies, extend them where necessary, and create a data quality dashboard for every data change and data health check Data Quality reports for each of the sources and sites. The team will also explore new methods of clinical data acquisition from HINs to mitigate data missingness with a focus on underrepresented populations by comparing All of Us participant-linked ambulatory EHR data from OCHIN, which includes Medicaid and uninsured patients, with EHR data from health systems served by Datavant. Diverse CLAD sources and novel analytical methods, such as probabilistic models, will be used to reveal patterns of care and potential interventions for communities underrepresented in biomedical research.