Biostatistics and Clinical Informatics
The Department of Neurology at UT Southwestern is the only neurology department in the country with a dedicated biostatistics and informatics section. Embedding this expertise within the department allows our faculty to form intense collaborations between statisticians, clinician scientists, and researchers.
Faculty
The section provides leadership and expertise in biostatistics and clinical informatics to collaborators in Neurology and investigators in the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute. The faculty pursue a myriad of investigator-initiated studies focused on neurology topics. Outside of the section's independent research, the team assists 30+ faculty and trainees with their respective projects. In addition to supporting neurology trainees for their QI projects, Justin Rousseau, M.D. serves as a mentor for the students in the Master of Science in Health Informatics.
Expertise
- Statistical Support
Our multidisciplinary team comprises faculty, biostatisticians, and a data scientist, who work closely with PIs on their study design for protocols or grants. They support collaborative research ranging from basic science to translational research and clinical trials.
What we do
We provide expertise in study design, statistical methods and analyses, clinical research informatics, and data management.
- Data analysis
- Database building and management
- Manuscript writing
- Multicenter clinical trial operations
- Preparing grant applications
- Ensure testable hypotheses
- Provide sample size estimation
- Provide statistical analysis plans
- Prepare randomization schedules
- Protocol development
- Quality assurance
- Clinical and Biomedical Informatics
Our team supports the department and the Peter O’Donnell Jr. Brain Institute in Clinical and Biomedical Informatics Activities.
What we do
We provide expertise for collaboration or consultation in clinical informatics, clinical research informatics, and population health informatics.
- Secondary Analysis of Electronic Health Records
- EHR phenotyping / Computable phenotypes
- Interface with Health System Information Resources for UTSW Epic customization
- Questionnaires and other methods for data capture
- Clinical Decision Support
- Clinical Registry Development
- Natural Language Processing
- Navigate Institutional Biomedical Informatics Resources such as:
- Clinical Informatics Center
- Health System and Information Resources
- Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Informatics Coordinating Office
- Clinical Research Databases such as i2b2, TriNetX, ENACT Network, PCORnet
- Standard Ontologies and Terminologies
Description of Clinical Research Databases
- Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside (i2b2): allows for sharing, integration, standardization, and analysis of heterogeneous data from healthcare and research. It is a life science focused open-source, open-data community.
- TriNetX: Access to downloadable curated data sets, global oncology registries, and the ability to build cohorts from 250M+ patient records.
- ENACT Network powered by NCATS: builds upon the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Consortium cohort discovery platform to enable investigators and trainees at CTSA hubs to conduct EHR-based research on any disease or condition across the network of over 142M patients.
- National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network (PCORnet): Data accessible via the PCORnet distributed network draws from millions of electronic health records (EHRs).
For access, please refer to the Data Science page.
Research
Our team has statistical expertise for the design and analysis of multidisciplinary research projects, clinical trials, and epidemiological research. We also support data management and analysis for multiple registries, research networks, and clinical trials.
