More than 300 responded to the informatics needs assessment survey distributed by CCTS and the UAB Informatics Institute in Sept. 2016. The majority of respondents were assistant, associate, or full professors in the UAB School of Medicine, but instructors, students, staff, fellows, and administrators from across the UAB campus participated, reflecting a broader appreciation for informatics in other health professions and fields such as computer science, engineering, and business.

Respondents identified their top “informatics tool/service” interests, including education and training (76.1%); access to, use of, and/or analytical support for clinical information from the UAB Health System electronic health record (EHR) (68.8%); assistance with use of high performance computing systems for data analysis (65.3%); access to, use of, and/or analytical support for biomolecular/bioinformatics data (56.5%); and information systems used to assist in the management of clinical trials (50.8%). Informatics Institute Director Dr. James Cimino was pleased to note “more than 50% of the respondents had heard of or made use of each resource listed and there was high interest in learning more about most of them.”

Participants were asked to describe their awareness and use of specific tools within each of the general categories listed above. “These are the data that will help us develop targeted, resource-specific outreach and training to help people really exploit the informatics tools available to them now, which will in turn enable us to make better predictions of future need for tools and services” said Cimino. Next steps also include a user satisfaction survey, he added.

Below are several highlights from the survey results. For more detailed information, contact the UAB Informatics Institute.

Education and Training (n=232)
Respondents expressed low to moderate awareness of opportunities for learning how to use research tools and resources related to education, such as the Kaizen educational platform (14%), clinical informatics research education (34%), and bioinformatics research education (40%). The level of interest in future trainings was high (86%). Suggestions included “interdisciplinary training for clinicians and basic scientists to help reframe research to yield more useful data for translation.”

UAB Health System EHR Tools and Services (n=209)
Level of awareness was low for most potential uses of EHR tools, including clinical cohort estimation (63%), identifying patients for enrollment (56%), availability of de-identified data sets (59%), the enterprise data warehouse (64%), and i2b2 (58%). On average 85% expressed definite or possible interest in future use of these tools, with dozens of suggestions provided when asked about other clinical data tools or resources of interest.

Computing Tasks and Resources (n=198)
Awareness was fairly low for UAB’s high-performance computing system, Cheaha (34%), supercomputing platforms such as the Alabama Supercomputer Authority (22%), and data storage facilities (35%). Level of interest in future use (definite or possible) averaged 76%.

Biomolecular/Bioinformatics Tools and Services (n=170)
Respondents were more aware of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) Data access and analysis support (59%) than of Galaxy (38%), a web-based tool providing self-service analysis of NGS data. An equal percentage of respondents were aware/unaware (49%) of access to microbiome and metagenomic data sets and the availability of assistance with analysis. Level of definite interest in future use of NGS was higher (52%) compared to interest in the other tools/services (36%). The most frequent response to suggestions for other resources was access to large, often proprietary data sets (Medicare, Medicaid, insurance, pharma, and cohorts such as REGARDS and CARDIA).

Clinical Trial Information Systems (n=150)
Respondents were more aware of the Impact (71%) and the Research Data Capture system for care report forms and surveys (RedCAP) (64%) as compared to the Comprehensive Clinical Trials Management System (OnCore) (34%) and PowerTrials, which supports participant recruitment, tracking, test/treatment ordering, and data capture (24%). Level of interest in future use of all these tools (definite or possible) was high, averaging 85%.