Skip to main content

BTRIS Launch

BTRIS Launch 2009


Photo of BTRIS ribbon cutting ceremony

“It is so great that we can expand horizons with new datasets and at the same time protect the privacy of our human subjects,” said Dr. Michael Gottesman, NIH deputy director of intramural research. Launching phase 1 of BTRIS—allowing investigators to access data for their own patients from the Clinical Center and across other NIH Institutes and Centers—and opening the BTRIS User-Support Center on July 30 were (from left) Elaine Ayres, deputy chief of the CC Laboratory for Informatics Development (LID); Dr. Jack Jones, NIH Chief Information Officer; Dr. Jim Cimino, chief of the CC LID; and Gottesman.

Photo of BTRIS staff

“I’ve been so fortunate to work with these great folks to get this built,” said Dr. Jim Cimino (middle back), BTRIS program director. The go-live event on July 30 publicized the top five uses of BTRIS: (1) Create an IRB Inclusion Enrollment Report in seconds. (2) Search across one protocol or multiple protocols for demographic data. (3) Tell an investigator all the patients on his/her protocol that receive a particular drug. (4) Find all an investigator’s patients with a lab value over a certain amount. (5) Create subsets of protocol subjects for retrieving detailed data sets.

Photo of BTRIS staff

Dr. Jack Jones, NIH Chief Information Officer addressed the crowd of staff who helped develop and implement the information system and future BTRIS users, calling the new approach to the mining of medical data “groundbreaking.” BTRIS provides users with advanced search, filtering, and aggregation methods to create data sets to support ongoing studies and stimulate ideas for new research.

Photo of Dr. Richard Davey speaking at the podium

NIAID’s Dr. Richard Davey performed the inaugural query in the BTRIS in a demonstration for those gathered at the go-live event, accessing an IRB Inclusion Enrollment Report. “How long does it take you to normally do this report?” asked Dr. Jim Cimino, BTRIS program director. “A long time,” Davey responded in the minute it took for his report to generate.

Photo of BTRIS User-support center

The BTRIS User-Support Center in the Hatfield Building’s room 4-2480 (to the right of the Medical Board Room) will provide walk-in support for users from 8:30 am to 5:00 pm, Monday through Friday through October 30. The team also provides self-paced, computer-based training modules at http://btrisintranet.cc.nih.gov/. Call 301-827-8270 or e-mail BTRISsupport@nih.gov with any questions.


NOTE: PDF documents require the free Adobe Reader.