Few hospitals and research institutions have a common repository for clinical and research information. Usually, health-care teams track patient history and treatment data, while scientists maintain their own data files. This complicates collection, maintenance, access to, and sharing of records, and often results in duplication of effort among various departments or groups.

To streamline cancer-specific data collection, HCI’s Informatics Department developed the Cancer Clinical Research (CCR) information system. Launched July 1, 2006, the CCR links HCI’s clinical and research data from various patient care and research groups. It also integrates information from other systems that contain medical records for patients in the University of Utah system.

The CCR provides a central location for information, saving data-entry time, eliminating redundant work, and providing access to data quickly and easily, even across departments. The system tracks information, makes it available in real time, and protects it with robust security and access rights, so patients are assured absolute confidentiality and anonymity when appropriate.

The CCR is already integrated with several systems, including HCI’s biosample tracking system, and it has already been customized to directly facilitate ongoing research on hepatobiliary malignancies. The goal is to link with more systems in the future, including pharmacy records, molecular databases such as microarray, and imaging.