Open source tools in support of a multi-center prospective biomarker study in prostate cancer.

The open source software tools developed at UCLA are the informatics infrastructure supporting translational research efforts of the 11 National Cancer Institutes Prostate SPORE sites. The Codebook is a caBIG compliant application that manages PHI (e.g.

The Central Codebook (CCB) at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Separating personal health information (PHI) from research data is a critical issue. In our work the Central CodeBook (CCB) functions as an 'honest broker' by mapping between internally meaningful, subject codes (IDs) and sensitive external identifiers like medical record numbers. The CCB is a web service enabled database-backed web application that brokers communications with our evolving EMR via the Clinical Information Network Exchange (CNEX).