A team of researchers at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center developed a data repository that integrates maternal, neonatal and pediatric patient records from across the Cincinnati region.
The Maternal and Infant Data Hub comprises information on 110,000-plus infants born at 14 regional hospitals between 2013 and 2017. The repository corrals data from electronic clinical and billing records, alongside geospatial information for each patient to support research into the roles neighborhoods and communities play on a patient's health.
The researchers plan to offer their colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and University of Cincinnati Medical Center access to the data repository to drive population health studies, such as investigations into inpatient, emergency department and urgent care visits during a child's first year of life or the impact opioids have on newborns in the region.
The researchers plan to continue integrating additional datasets into the repository, including information on environmental factors, according to Eric Hall, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics at the hospital who led the Maternal and Infant Data Hub project.
"Measures of community maternal and infant health are instrumental in planning and allocating resources, testing relevant hypotheses and effectively operating healthcare and community-based programs," he said during an interview published on the Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center and University of Cincinnati College of Medicine's biomedical informatics blog Jan. 19.