Acronym Guide (WUSTL Office of Medical Public Affairs)
This guide covers a number of WUSTL and WUSM departments, offices, units, divisions, centers, job titles, etc.
BAA - Business Associate Agreement
Written arrangement that specifies each party's responsibilities in order to maintain safeguards for PHI with regards to HIPAA requirements.
HIPAA Privacy Office BAA info and template
Cohort
In statistics, a cohort is a group of subjects who share a defining characteristics.
Contracts, types of
An EHR or electronic health record is a digital record of health information. It contains all the information you’d find in a paper chart — and a lot more. An EHR may include past medical history, vital signs, progress notes, diagnoses, medications, immunization dates, allergies, lab data and imaging reports. It can also contain other relevant information, such as insurance information, demographic data, and even data imported from personal wellness devices.
CDS
CDS – pre-Epic equivalent of HDC
Also called PES. See Legacy system notes for more information.
CDR
CDR – Clinical Data Respository
A pre-Epic equivalent of Clarity. See Legacy system notes for more information.
CRID
CRID = Clinical Research ID
EMR/EMR
Electronic Health Record / Electronic Medical Records (Ex: Epic)
Digital records or charts that contain general information such as treatment and medical history about a patient collected by a medical practice
ETL
Extract, Transform, Load
In computing, ETL is the general procedure of copying data from one or multiple sources into a destination system which represents the data differently than from the source.
For example, a daily .csv file placed on an FTP site could be picked up (extracted) by a scheduled (cron) job, converted into a flat JSON file and loaded into a database hosted by I2.
Alternatively, this process could be "ELT" wherein the data is transformed in staging tables or a data lake before being loaded into a data warehouse or blob storage.
HIPAA
Health Information Portability and Accountability Act
WUSTL HIPAA Privacy Office Policies and Procedures
HRPO
Human Research Protection Office
HRPO is the group/office that is contacted with IRB questions, especially during regulatory reviews. Their website is https://hrpo.wustl.edu/.
GAEN
Google/Apple Exposure Notification
An exposure notification system from Apple Inc. and Google to facilitate COVID-19 contract tracing
GCS
Google Cloud Storage
ICD (Such as ICD-10 or ICD-9)
International Classification of Diseases
Global diagnostic tool used for health management purposes; an ICD-9 or ICD-10 code is used widely throughout the American medical industry. The classification system (ICD-10) includes more than 55,000 different codes and permits for tracking diagnoses and procedures. ICD-9 contained approximately 17,000 codes.
IRB
Institutional Review Board
A review board of designated individuals who approve and monitor biomedical research involving human subjects. At WUSTL, approved projects have an IRB Number.
MDClone
A synthetic data platform populated with data from the RDC. The data is "synthetic" and does not contain PHI.
PHI
Protected Health Information
Defined by HIPAA; includes all individually identifiable health information
Regulatory Review
A process by which I2DB resources review a Statement of Work (see "Statement of Work" below) to compare it to an approved IRB to verify that data elements requested in the SOW may all be released/disclosed to the requestor and their research team. This is billable project work and is a requirement from HRPO in exchange for giving I2DB resources access to all of the various data source systems.
REDCap
Research Electronic Data Capture
Browser-based Electronic Data Capture for clinical and translational research databases developed in 2004 at Vanderbilt University. I2DB maintains WashU's instance of REDCap, which as of July 2023 is on version 13, as well as a separate version 7 instance which is in the process of being shut down (ideally by the end of 2023).
RDC
Research Data Core
An IRB-approved service for clinical and translational research needs for WUSM and BJC researchers which contains data from 1997 to present including:
• Inpatient data from across BJC network facilities
• Outpatient data from Epic
• Demographics, encounters, diagnoses, procedure, medication order, lab results, vitals, allergies, surgery, microbiology, social history, problem list, practitioner and insurance data
SOW
Statement of Work
A document prepared by I2DB project/portfolio managers and/or team leads which is sent to requestors and outlines the work to be done by I2DB resources, the estimated effort and the associated costs based on the applicable billing rates. I2DB uses these documents to help minimize scope creep and provide requestors with a "quote" but also uses it as the reference point for data elements/values/domains requested. These documents are signed by requestors before work is added to the backlog.