The Biomedical Research Informatics Centre for Cardiovascular Science (BRICCS)

BRICCS is a system for capturing and coding clinical information about patients with cardiovascular disease seen in UHL specifically for research purposes and for facilitating recruitment of patients into new studies. We will consider all patients attending relevant departments in UHL as potential research participants and proactively seek their consent to access their clinical notes and data for research.

University Hospitals of Leicester Trust already collects a large amount of information on patients, both of a generic nature and more detailed information on specific groups for national audit which are of interest to Leicester Cardiovascular Biomedical Research Unit (e.g. those undergoing cardiac catheter-lab related procedures or coronary artery bypass and patients with myocardial infarction and acute coronary syndromes).

The Biomedical Research Informatics Centre for Cardiovascular Science (BRICCS) is a software platform to support translational research within the BRU. It will save precious time toward new research by leveraging existing clinical data for research purposes.

The core of BRICCS is a dedicated research database, the first of its kind in the UK, linked to a collection of blood samples from patient volunteers who have consented to make their medical records available to researchers.  After eighteen months of operation BRICCS has recruited 1900 patients so far.  This enables us to match suitable patients to particular future studies, and speed up the recruitment phase of nw research.

BRICCS is being implemented by a collaborative team incorporating BRU staff, UHL IM&T and the University of Leicester Research Computing Services team (RCS, part of IT Services). Hardware to deliver BRICCS is being hosted both in the UHL NHS Trust and the University RCS. The University IT Services have made providing support to the BRU and specifically the BRICCS research project a priority in developing a model for improved support to researchers in the University. This has involved both the hosting and support of some technical services but also the provision of research data management expertise for the project.

BRICCS developers are working with a number of international projects to utilise open source clinical research tools within the BRICCS platform. The first three tools integrated into BRICCS will be:

• caTissue - a biospecimen tracking and inventory tool produced under the US National Cancer Institute's Cancer Biomedical Informatics Grid (caBIG), https://cabig.nci.nih.gov
• Onyx - a data collection and patient interview tool produced by the international OBiBa project, a core project of the Population Project in Genomics Consortium, http://www.obiba.org
• i2b2 - Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside - is a scalable informatics framework that enables clinical researchers to use existing clinical data for discovery research, developed by the US National Center for Biomedical Computing based at Partners Healthcare Systems / Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA, http://www.i2b2.org

For further information regarding BRICCS please view the BRICCS Fact File (PDF) or contact:

Nick Holden, Senior Database Officer, on 0116 250 2541 or nrh11@le.ac.uk