Penn Medicine's efforts to integrate clinical data for research purposes, "PennOmics," launched in 2014, has received one of the 2016 Healthcare Informatics Innovator Awards from Healthcare Informatics Magazine. Among the driving forces of the data integration was the need for a combined de-identified platform for a tumor registry, genetic data, biobank data, and clinical trials data, along with the eventual ability to search unstructured data using natural language processing (NLP).

Michael D. Feldman, MD, PhD, associate professor of pathology and laboratory medicine, says more data is gradually being moved into the PennOmics platform in the area of precision medicine: “We have a reliable pipeline now for moving our next-generation sequencing data for oncology into PennOmics and are beginning to see researchers depositing their data from samples that they have run on clinical specimens back into PennOmics.” Linking patient biosamples will allow researchers to test hypotheses being generated in animal models and to study clinical effectiveness by doing retrospective analytics on aggregated data.  
Read the Healthcare Informatics article.