Thursday, June 14, 2012

SHRINE (Distributed Queries Across Hospitals) for the Study of Peripartum Cardiomyopathy

Recently published in Nature is a study entitled "Cardiac angiogenic imbalance leads to peripartum cardiomyopathy." On close review we were pleasantly surprised to see:

Retrospective analyses of PPCM and pre-eclampsia in the Harvard teaching hospitals were performed using the Harvard Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE)[ref], a de-identified repository of aggregate patient information.

This is all the more exciting because none of the i2b2 core team were aware of this study that used this distributed query mechanism across multiple health centers. There are now a half doze SHRINE network operational nationwide (some of which go coast to coast) and so we anticipate that there will be many more such unanticipated results.

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