Marshfield Clinic Health System (MCHS) has a long history of innovation that has led to cutting edge and transformative research. CattailsMD, an in-house developed electronic health record (EHR) system, was the first physician practice-driven EHR accredited by the Certification Commission for Health Information Technology. As we transition to one EHR platform across our system of care, this spirit of innovation continues.

The Office of Research Computing and Analytics (ORCA) provides and supports a scalable, scientific computational infrastructure to researchers throughout Marshfield Clinic Research Institute (MCRI) and MCHS as well as technical consulting for various projects. ORCA staff members are dedicated to providing support to MCRI and MCHS researchers over the entire lifecycle of a project.

Infrastructure and Central Resource staff includes Analysts, Software Engineers, Systems, and Database staff to provide a full service Information Technology support team dedicated to Research.

  • Development, administration, and support of Research systems
  • Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) hosting, custom development of external modules, plug-ins, etc., project development, and support
  • Recognized for our contributions with the REDCap community:
  • Integration of EHR decision support tools to drive patient safety and quality at point of care
  • Natural language processing capabilities to allow for hidden insights to be extracted from unstructured documentation/notes
  • Oversight of research application security, appropriate data use, de-identification, and data sharing to protect patient/participant privacy

The Research Analytics and Data Management core in ORCA supports researcher access to the Marshfield Clinical Research Data Warehouse (RDW). The RDW contains over 14.4 million patient-years of clinical data with digital records extending back to 1960. The RDW receives daily feeds from the Enterprise Data Warehouse, which is fed by all major MCHS systems as well as numerous affiliated healthcare providers.

  • The Research Analytics team collaborates with other Institute Centers, internal and external scientists, Quality and Care Delivery staff and clinicians on the development of appropriate tools and data sources to accelerate the translation of scientific discoveries from bench to bed-side/chair-side; thus, improving the delivery, quality, and safety of care.
    • Preparatory to research – determining feasibility of a project or availability of a population
    • Proposal review – assess whether aims are possible and assertions are reasonable
    • Data consultation and investigation
    • Data model development and maintenance
    • Documentation of trends
    • Development of study collection tools (REDCap, etc.)
    • Project development: Consultation on experimental design, data collection methods, statistical analysis
    • Validation and/or interpretation of research findings
    • Manuscript review