2025 Fall CTSA Program Annual Meeting

The Informatics and Data Science core at NC TraCS provisions electronic health record data for 250-300 research studies each year. These datasets range from simple Excel spreadsheets; to millions of records across tens of tables, extracted as individual CSVs; to sizeable JSON files containing thousands or more free-text clinical notes. While this provisioning process has served thousands of studies, it has fallen behind in meeting the needs of modern data science in a number of ways: (1) performance, for analyses that require significant compute; (2) auditing, to ensure users are adhering to our policies; (3) security, to programmatically restrict users from moving or exfiltrating data; and (4) file formatting, to provide very large files in optimal formats (e.g., Parquet) rather than unwieldy CSVs.
To address these shortcomings, UNC School of Medicine and UNC Health have developed a new analytical ecosystem, including the following systems:
• TriNetX, a commercial platform for cohort counts and no-code analyses.
• ORDR(D), a homegrown platform for exploring deidentified clinical data with a low barrier to entry.
• The SHIRE, a homegrown cloud environment to support sophisticated analyses and secure AI with identified data.
Here, we describe ORDR(D) and SHIRE, particularly focusing on the components of those systems that are shareable with other CTSA hubs.