Journal:Health sciences libraries advancing collaborative clinical research data management in universities

Full article title	Health Sciences Libraries Advancing Collaborative Clinical Research Data Management in Universities
Journal	Journal of eScience Librarianship
Author(s)	Bardyn, Tania P.; Patridge, Emily F.; Moore, Michael T.; Koh, Jane J.
Author affiliation(s)	University of Washington
Primary contact	Email: bardyn at uw dot edu
Year published	2018
Volume and issue	7(2)
Page(s)	e1130
DOI	10.7191/jeslib.2018.1130
ISSN	2161-3974
Distribution license	Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Website	https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/jeslib/vol7/iss2/4/
Download	https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1130&context=jeslib (PDF)

Abstract

Purpose: Medical libraries need to actively review their service models and explore partnerships with other campus entities to provide better-coordinated clinical research management services to faculty and researchers. TRAIL (Translational Research and Information Lab), a five-partner initiative at the University of Washington (UW), explores how best to leverage existing expertise and space to deliver clinical research data management (CRDM) services and emerging technology support to clinical researchers at UW and collaborating institutions in the Pacific Northwest.

Methods: The initiative offers 14 services and a technology-enhanced innovation lab located in the Health Sciences Library (HSL) to support the University of Washington clinical and research enterprise. Sharing of staff and resources merges library and non-library workflows, better coordinating data and innovation services to clinical researchers. Librarians have adopted new roles in CRDM, such as providing user support and training for UW’s Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) instance.

Results: TRAIL staff are quickly adapting to changing workflows and shared services, including teaching classes on tools used to manage clinical research data. Researcher interest in TRAIL has sparked new collaborative initiatives and service offerings. Marketing and promotion will be important for raising researchers’ awareness of available services.

Conclusions: Medical librarians are developing new skills by supporting and teaching CRDM. Clinical and data librarians better understand the information needs of clinical and translational researchers by being involved in the earlier stages of the research cycle and identifying technologies that can improve healthcare outcomes. At health sciences libraries, leveraging existing resources and bringing services together is central to how university medical librarians will operate in the future.

Keywords: clinical research data management, sharing workflows, virtual reality, library innovation space, national network of libraries of medicine, REDCap, librarian roles

Introduction

Medical libraries confront an array of challenges in the ways they have traditionally operated to support their clinical and research missions. Library directors work with resource constraints and pressure to reduce costs, implement new services and applications, and improve outcomes. For shared workflows, medical libraries require active review of their service models and exploration of partnerships with other campus departments and entities. Supporting clinical research data management (CRDM) and uses of emerging technologies in healthcare is a good solution for many medical libraries interested in evolving their service model.

Increased attention is being paid to clinical data that may be developed and maintained by hospitals and companies. This data, based on patients’ contacts and electronic health records, could provide detailed information to those involved in population health research in and outside hospitals. CRDM expands beyond patient records and literature searches into data visualization, survey creation, bioinformatics consultation, and fostering the use of emerging technologies, like virtual and augmented reality.

Initiatives like the Translational Research and Information Lab (TRAIL), founded at the University of Washington’s (UW) Health Sciences Library (HSL), are vital to the future of medical libraries. Established in late 2016, to improve clinical research support, the five-partner initiative explores how best to coordinate data and innovation services for clinical researchers. TRAIL offers 14 online and in-person services and an innovation space in the library. It has provided the groundwork for the pooling of partner resources and extended collaboration between leading medical research-related campus departments and services, establishing a definitive support system for translational clinical research. (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Rendering of a VR cardiac surgery case conference in TRAIL

Cross-partner staff sharing and IT support has also provided HSL librarians with opportunities to spread their expertise beyond the confines of the library, benefiting the clinical research community and libraries as a whole.

Background

University of Washington Health Sciences Library

The UW HSL supports four hospitals in the Puget Sound, the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho) region, and six health sciences schools: Medicine, Dentistry, Public Health, Pharmacy, Nursing, and Social Work. The mission is to advance scholarship, research, education, and health care by anticipating information needs, providing essential resources and services, and facilitating learning for the greater health sciences community. The 35 full-time employees include librarians and staff who teach students, researchers, and clinicians how to think critically, how to access and interpret available information, and what to do if little or no evidence exists.

As with most medical libraries, HSL’s collection budget is almost exclusively dedicated to electronic material, with existing print material seldom circulating or used, except by request from other institutions through an interlibrary loan service.

Translational Research and Information Lab (TRAIL)

In assessing UW Libraries services during a triennial survey, a recurring theme of the HSL emerged: health sciences researchers and faculty desired more support from the library in their research. More specifically, faculty indicated needs for services that support managing, archiving, and preserving research data.

To fill that research support gap, the Associate Dean and Director of the Library explored partnerships with other departments. Meetings convened with UW’s Chief Information Research Officer and the leadership of Institute for Translational Health Sciences (ITHS), Department of Biomedical Information and Medical Education (BIME), and UW Medicine Information Technology Services (ITS) explored how best to address this gap and provide better-coordinated clinical research management services to faculty and researchers. Subsequent meetings were held with the Chair of BIME and the Associate Director for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine, Pacific Northwest Region (NNLM PNR), to discuss a partnership to share the provision of CRDM, team science services and staffing to aid campus and regional researchers. Those partnerships link to the National Library of Medicine’s (NLM) data initiative and develop a mechanism for bringing NLM programs more directly to researchers affiliated with the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA).

The partner leadership agreed on an overarching mandate: to provide operational coordination of innovation, clinical research and data management, team science, and informatics services to health sciences researchers. Six guiding principles were established: collaboration, quality, assessment, diversity, education, and access (Figure 2).

Figure 2. TRAIL guiding principles

Together, these partners officially launched the TRAIL initiative at the UW campus in 2016 by pooling staffing and designing a space in the library to house a technological-enhanced and collaborative innovation space to support over 4,900 faculty and researchers in 30 departments at the University. An Assistant Director of Clinical Research & Data Services (CRDS) was hired to lead the initiative and implement three goals in Year 1:

1. to provide an innovation space for UW-affiliated researchers to meet and collaborate;
2. to introduce, triage, and provide consultations on research data management tools (e.g., REDCap); and
3. to merge workflows and staffing to develop a new service model for supporting researchers at UW.

Methodology

Building a researcher-focused space

HSL floor space is predominantly dedicated to general student study space, offering solo quiet zones, general open study areas, and bookable group study rooms. However, those student-focused spaces aren’t conducive to supporting researchers needing dedicated, technology-enhanced meeting and collaborative spaces.

TRAIL’s first step was to develop a suitable, innovative, researcher-focused, and technology-enhanced innovation lab within HSL. Due to the limiting infrastructure, building a completely new room was deemed too expensive. With study spaces in high demand, particularly around exams, it was more logical to convert an existing office space, rather than take over a student study area.

An 838-sq. ft. room, centrally located on the lower of HSL’s two floors, was selected to become TRAIL. A 10-person committee from the five partner organizations selected the final design and technology choices after consulting with administrators, librarians, IT staff, and key faculty stakeholders. The space was designed by an interior designer. CompView, an audiovisual integrator based in Seattle, helped decide what technologies to incorporate into the lab, with renovations overseen by the Assistant Director of CRDS. Current elements in TRAIL include:

• Data wall: The space features six 55” LCD panels configured as a data wall in a three-wide-by-two-high arrangement. The data wall can be set up in various configurations, such as one image displayed across all six screens, a separate image for each of the six, or a hybrid of one image across four screens with separate images across the other two. Each individual panel is 1920×1080 HD, with a total display resolution of 5760×2160, and offering more pixels than a 4K display. An HSL IT staff member is assigned to assist with setup and troubleshoot issues for first-time users.

• Workstation: The data wall is supported by its own dedicated internet-equipped work station with USB ports to allow users to upload presentations and other files. Users can project their own laptops and mobile devices onto the data wall using standard display methods (e.g., HDMI, VGA, etc.), allowing for various display arrangements to be showcased across the six screens.

Notes

This presentation is faithful to the original, with only a few minor changes to presentation. In some cases important information was missing from the references, and that information was added. The original paper did not use any inline citations, so it's not clear what text the references correspond to.