Bringing research to the point of care: Hypergenes project study.

With advance of health information IT systems and increasing volumes of disparate biomedical information repositories, harvesting them for research purposes is becoming more difficult. This is partly due to the proprietary nature of the current systems, but also due to diverse requirements of different research paradigms. On the flip side, ever larger amounts of clinical and genomic data are currently accumulated in research projects. Tapping into these research silos would not only contribute to further research, but could help convey timely information to clinicians at the point of care. This paper presents RIMon - a portal-based infrastructure for information-intensive research cycle as used in the Hypergenes project, which aims at building a method to dissect complex genetic traits using essential hypertension as a disease model. RIMon allows users to: (a) collect data from points of care, (b) query and retrieve collected data for analysis, (c) query accumulated information and knowledge to construct disease models based on analysis results, and (d) to eventually make the research results readily available to the clinicians at the point of care. This translational cycle is demonstrated in the Hypergenes project along with a potential usage scenario.