ARC Mission

The Allergy & Infectious Diseases (and Department of Medicine) Research Collaboratory (ARC) has three core aims that encapsulate our mission:

1. To advance knowledge that optimizes how we care for our patients, using data analytics.
2. To leverage the power of electronic health record (EHR) and understand how to use these data wisely.
3. To foster a learning health system that trains junior investigators to harness these data into actionable insights.

In this era of “big data,” healthcare data are among the biggest and most complicated for the following reasons:

• These data live in multiple places
• They come in diverse forms: both structured and unstructured and
• One cannot take these data at face value

The clinical enterprise caring for patients is enormously complex. Clinical definitions can be dynamic and subject to an ever-changing evidence base. To manage and transform healthcare data into something usable across a population in a way that can provide actionable insights requires a special set of knowledge and tools. This is where ARC comes in.

Our mission is to help investigators leverage the power of these digital data to generate meaningful evidence that closes the gap between practice and quality care.

Our Data Services

UW Medicine is a large health system that has been capturing clinical data from the electronic health record (EHR) since late 1990s . Since 2008, UW Information Technology has organized and coalesced these data to facilitate multiple clinical, operational and research initiatives across our organization. But, access to the UW Enterprise Data Warehouse (now more accurately known as DEEP) still requires a skilled data analyst to query and extract these data. ARC can assist in accessing this data warehouse and offer advice on data sources, study design, clinical phenotyping and analytic methods. To get started, please complete this:

Leaf is a self-service clinical data discovery tool offered through UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences (ITHS) that provides a powerful data exploratory platform for users to access and explore the UW clinical data directly for research and quality improvement (QI) purposes (with some limitations).

Stats Curbside is a service we offer to junior members of the Division of AID who have not yet established grant funding or have a statistician at their disposal and may have questions related to R coding, data management or analytic questions.

Please note: we are not able to provide statistical support for non-AID members at this time.

ARC Core Team

Dr. Nina Kim, Professor of Medicine in the Division of Allergy & Infectious Diseases (DAID), founded ARC in January 2018 along with Dr. Anna Wald (AID Division head) and Dr. Robert Harrington (Harborview Chief of Medicine). Dr. Kim brings a background in clinical epidemiology, observational research and data science through her work within the UW Center for AIDS Research Clinical Cohort & Comorbidity Research Core.

Kristine Lan is the DAID data analyst and a masters-level biostatistician who trained at the University of Michigan. Ayushi Gupta is the Department of Medicine (DOM) data analyst with a masters in biomedical and health informatics from the University of North Carolina.

Acknowledge ARC

If we were involved in data acquisition/extraction and not in the conception, design or analysis of the project, we do not need to be credited as co-authors (see ICMJE criteria for authorship). But we would appreciate an acknowledgement of our contribution in your manuscript: “We thank {Kristine Lan} for her assistance with data acquisition. This work was made possible by the support of the UW Allergy & Infectious Diseases Research Collaboratory (ARC).”

ARC Publications

Resources & Reading