Industry Insight

Harris Healthcare Group Acquires Iatric Systems

Iatric Systems, a health care technology company dedicated to helping health care organizations enhance their IT investments, recently announced that it has been acquired by Harris Computer Systems (“Harris”) through its Healthcare group. Iatric Systems will be run as an independent business unit within Harris. Frank Fortner, a long-term Iatric Systems senior executive, has been named as executive vice president for Iatric Systems.

“This investment is a tremendous vote of confidence in our team and technology,” Fortner says. “We are pleased to become part of the Harris family of companies. This positions Iatric Systems well for continued and long-term success in line with our 28-year history of providing innovative health care IT solutions to hospitals and health care systems. Harris will provide an enhanced set of tools and resources to support and serve our customer community.”

Jerry Canada, Jr, president of Harris Healthcare group, says, “The acquisition of Iatric Systems represents a natural extension of our offerings in the health care information technology segment. We are very happy to have acquired a leader and innovator in this sector.”

— Source: Iatric Systems

PCORI Board Approves Policy to Share Research Data

The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) Board of Governors recently approved a new policy calling for the researchers PCORI funds to share their data sets and documentation for reanalysis and reuse. The new policy is among the most far-reaching adopted by publicly supported funders of health research.

The policy advances PCORI’s commitment to open science by encouraging use of data from the studies it funds to allow other researchers to verify and build on those findings to generate new evidence available to health care decision makers. Data sharing can accelerate the discovery of new and better care approaches through additional analyses, reproduction of published findings, and development of avenues for new research.

Under the policy, certain research teams that receive PCORI funding—and particularly those that receive larger PCORI awards—are expected to place the data generated during their studies, as well as the documentation for how the data were produced, into a repository designated by PCORI. These data, including deidentified information collected from study participants, full protocols, meta-data, and statistical analysis plans, can then be made available to other research teams for reanalysis and additional analyses. A distinguishing feature of PCORI’s approach is that funding will be provided to research teams to prepare the data and other materials for sharing.

“Through this data sharing policy, we’re taking a major step in advancing open science,” says PCORI Executive Director Joe Selby, MD, MPH. “By supporting how others may use information generated by the studies we’ve funded, we’re helping to enhance the quality and increase the quantity of evidence for health care decision making. We’re also reducing redundancy in collecting clinical data sets, which can speed research and the production of more useful evidence.”

To protect the privacy of study participants, the new PCORI policy stipulates that all personally identifiable health information must be deidentified in accordance with HIPAA regulations. Similarly, informed consent obtained from study participants must be sufficiently broad to permit future research by other researchers. Requests to access data and documents in the repository will be reviewed based on the scientific merit of the request and on the qualifications of the requestors.

— Source: Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute