CA Child Health Research Coalition
UC BRAID-Child Health (BRAID-CH) has transitioned to a new statewide collaboration, the
California Child Health Research Coalition. This effort expands upon BRAID-CH’s experience,
skills and innovative investigator-initiated research projects.

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Vision: The Coalition will build an innovative, collegial, and collaborative network of child health centers, hospitals, and clinics in an effort to support clinical research activities that will rapidly provide new therapies, medical devices, quality care, efficient healthcare delivery, and health prevention strategies to all the people in California and beyond.

Background: Since 2013, BRAID-CH has sought to serve as a UC consortium focused on a group of pediatric diseases while building on the strengths of the existing UC BRAID structure.

 

Some of BRAID-CH’s accomplishments:

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• Received UC award to build and test EMR templates in representative pediatric research

• Funded and implemented two Child Health Catalytic Grant Awards, serving as a model areas (Diabetes Nutrition, Chronic Disease) for a national initiative to support multidisciplinary pediatric research

• Held the first UC wide Autism Summit in 2014 and received a UC award for a multisite Autism Research Pilot Study

• Developed partnership with the UC Fetal Consortium
   

For more information, please contact:

Dan M. Cooper, MD                        Christina Chambers, PhD, MPH
Director, ICTS ; AVC for CTS         Professor, Pediatrics
UC Irvine                                          UC San Diego
E: dcooper@uci.edu                       E: chchambers@ucsd.edu
P: 714-456-2317                               P: 619-294-3791

 

Biobanking
Overview: The UC BRAID Biobanking work group aided in the creation of best practice documentation and a governance model for high-quality biospecimens banks in order for biobanks to meet emerging Federal standards and help accelerate the pace of translational research.
 
Goals

• Through an inclusive governance model and standard processes for “UC-recognized” biobanks we hoped to ensure biosamples have the highest possible quality and that biobanks operated ethically and met professional accreditation standards.

• The aim was to develop biobanking educational programs and assist interested UC biobanks to achieve standards to be "UC-recognized"

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Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs)

• Distribution SOP

• Procurement SOP

• Storage SOP

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Articles of Interest

• Assessing Researcher Needs for a Virtual Biobank (New!)

• EngageUC: Developing an Efficient and Ethical Approach to Biobanking Research at the University of California 

• A Solidarity-Based Approach to the Governance of Research Biobanks

• Best Practices for Establishing a Biobank

• Characterizing Biobank Organizations in the US: Results from a National Survey

UC-Research eXchange (UC ReX)
Overview: Launched by UC BRAID, the UC ReX Informatics consortium built the first cross-campus clinical query system capable of providing aggregates (counts and descriptive statistics) across five UC health systems. The  UC ReX Data Explorer was a secure online system that enables cross-institution queries of clinical aggregate data from 15+ million de-identified records derived from patient care activities.
 
Search criteria included demographics, diagnosis and procedure codes, top lab orders, vital status, and medications. The output of each query was a numeric count of cohorts by site that matched the criteria identified in the query. The counts helped investigators assess the feasibility of their study ideas by identifying whether there were sufficient numbers of prospective subjects within the UC system. This set the stage for critically needed multicenter research efforts and quality improvement initiatives.
 
Goals
We enabled researchers and quality improvement specialists to query clinical data collected at the point of care at all UC campuses for research or quality improvement purposes.

 

Click here for more information.