This is the hypothesis behind the SuperAgers Family Study, launched by researchers from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in collaboration with the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) and Boston University School of Medicine, and supported by AFAR’s multi-year SuperAgers Initiative. The study recently exceeded its initial recruitment milestone, demonstrating early success in reaching this unique population.

The SuperAgers Family Study aims to collect data from 10,000 people, primarily individuals 95 and older, but also including their children and children’s spouses. This target enrollment number makes SuperAgers the most ambitious research program studying the biology behind exceptional longevity to date.

Historically, reaching aging populations for health research has been difficult. Many researchers still rely on face-to-face and clinical interactions and resist the use of digital methods for enrollment and data collection. By exceeding their first recruitment milestone, the SuperAgers study demonstrates that digital approaches can engage aging populations.

“We’ve seen that, contrary to popular belief, there is some comfort with technology among this population, although it varies,” said Sofiya Milman, MD, MS, who is the director of Human Longevity Studies at Einstein’s Institute for Aging Research and the principal investigator of the study. “For those with less comfort, our recruitment of superager offspring in the study helps to foster compliance in superagers using digital methods. When needed, we can also leverage traditional and hybrid methods to perform eConsent and data collection.”

To meet, engage, and study superagers, the research team chose to collaborate with Vibrent Health, a digital technology company known for its innovation in precision medicine research solutions. Vibrent specializes in providing research teams with multi-modal approaches to eConsent, participant engagement, and data collection – the latter of which comprises electronic medical records, genomics, wearables, surveys, and more.

“Studies exploring the contributing factors of healthy aging will be more effective if we can achieve larger numbers of participants in the research. We already see that technology can succeed in reaching aging populations,” said Nir Barzilai, MD, Scientific Director at AFAR. “Our collaboration with Vibrent will help amass a data set whose magnitude will significantly move forward the identification of genetic, biological and behavioral factors that affect aging and its related diseases, delivering immediate and significant benefits to the legion of scientists and clinicians dedicated to healthy aging.”

The SuperAgers Family Study uses Vibrent’s Participant Experience Manager to support the eConsent process and complete data collection in a way that meets them where they are, using a mix of digital methods, computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), and paper forms. Study staff also use Vibrent’s powerful researcher tools to manage communication and appointments with participants. Vibrent’s platform provides the team with a way to manage, visualize, and better understand the data they collect throughout the study. In the future, the study also plans to provide genomics return of results to the participants and their family members.

“The important research the SuperAgers team is doing demands a participant-centric approach at every step, because the study population is so unique,” said Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “The novel discoveries that this research team makes will no doubt set new precedents for research, and for family-based studies. As health research becomes increasingly digital, family-based datasets represent a robust, promising area of precision health research.”

Those who wish to be a part of the SuperAgers Study can find study qualifications by visiting superagersstudy.org.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from 1 million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. Since 2020, Vibrent has also collaborated with numerous organizations to conduct a variety of research initiatives spanning several topics, including precision medicine, cancer, COVID, substance abuse, aging, and fertility, among others. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

About AFAR

The American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) is a national non-profit organization that supports and advances pioneering biomedical research that is revolutionizing how we live healthier and longer. For more than four decades, AFAR has served as the field’s talent incubator, providing more than $193 million to nearly 4,350 investigators at premier research institutions to date—and growing. In 2022, AFAR awarded over $11,000,000 to more than 60 investigators. A trusted leader and strategist, AFAR also works with public and private funders to steer high quality grant programs and interdisciplinary research networks. AFAR-funded researchers are finding that modifying basic cellular processes can delay—or even prevent—many chronic diseases, often at the same time. They are discovering that it is never too late—or too early—to improve health. This groundbreaking science is paving the way for innovative new therapies that promise to improve and extend our quality of life—at any age. Learn more at afar.org or follow AFARorg on Facebook and American Federation for Aging Research on LinkedIn.

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The peer-reviewed study aims to determine individuals’ social, mental, and physical well-being across the state of Virginia, an area with evidence of a growing rural-urban demographic divide. Increasingly, there are distinct socioeconomic differences between the multiethnic population of Northern Virginia and the predominately white population in rural communities. This unique sociodemographic distribution offers an interesting and important source to examine the multifaceted impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in a broad range of lifestyle, environmental, economic, and social settings.

The study is led by an industry-academic collaboration including Vibrent Health, George Mason University, and the Healthcare Analytics and Delivery Science Institute (HADSI)—a collaboration between Eastern Virginia Medical School and regional healthcare provider Sentara. A study team comprised of experts from these organizations collaboratively designed and deployed a statewide digital health research study called COVIDsmart to understand the effects of COVID-19.

COVIDsmart relies exclusively on digital methods for eConsent, participant communication and engagement, and data collection. The study team used the scientifically-validated ResearchCloud Enterprise platform across multiple research domains, including physiological, neurological, social neuroscience, socio-psychological, and behavioral economics.

At time of publication of the paper, the study was able to convert nearly 21% of visitors to the study website, using only digital touchpoints. The most successful recruitment modality resulting in study enrollment was the use of newsletters or emails that popularized the study across the target catchment areas within Virginia.

“The preliminary findings of COVIDsmart demonstrate that individuals are willing to participate in fully-remote digital health research, which is promising news for infectious disease research,” said Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “Digital methods not only enable researchers to scale their participant populations over larger areas, but also protect patients and research teams from potential risks of in-person data collection. The high level of engagement in this study confirms the viability of this approach.”

The data collected remotely included mood, social communication and isolation, alcohol dependency, sleep deprivation, and other behavioral risk indicators over time. The study team also implemented incentives, reminders, and other retention strategies for participants.

This concluded study represents a growing priority within the research community to build permanence and sustainability in infectious disease research. Digital health research using platforms like ResearchCloud Enterprise provide a safe, scalable, and speedy model for infectious disease and epidemic monitoring.

“The industry-academic collaboration for COVIDsmart holds great promise for accelerating research in infectious disease, and we hope to do more of it,” said Jain. “We are actively working to support more collaborations and invite other research programs to partner with us in these initiatives to accelerate the benefit to global health.”

To discuss potential collaborations in health or clinical research, visit https://info.vibrenthealth.com/request-a-pilot.

The post Vibrent Health Announces Publication of a Peer Reviewed Scientific Paper for a Study Using Exclusively Digital Methods for Data Collection to Study COVID-19’s Impact appeared first on Vibrent.

The interview series connects with experts in the research community to investigate the challenges that research programs face in building human cohorts. Topics that the leaders discuss include using eConsent to build trust, community outreach and recruitment, participant engagement, data collection, communicating with patients, return of genomics results, diversity in cohorts, and many more.

Research teams work diligently to build cohorts for research and to increase the scientific value of existing cohorts. In helping study teams tell their stories, this podcast engages researchers on best practices for using digital methods, through real world evidence from current studies.

The first episode features Howard McLeod, the Executive Director of Intermountain Precision Medicine. In the interview, Dr. McLeod explores topics regarding the success and challenges of the Heredigene study, most notably in communicating with participants after genomic data collection.

“While innovations in sequencing, precision health, and population genomics have been well-documented, there has been very little focus on how research programs engage the humans behind the data,” said Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “Without the active participation of humans, you have no data. In this podcast we spotlight the participant experience.”

Upcoming episodes will feature leaders from many of the most innovative human cohort research programs active today.

New episodes will be released monthly, and are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from 1 million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. Since 2020, Vibrent has also collaborated with numerous organizations to conduct a variety of research initiatives spanning several topics, including precision medicine, cancer, COVID, substance abuse, aging, fertility, and more.

The post Podcast <i>People of Precision Health</i> Debuts to Explore How Leaders in Precision Health Research are Using Digital Methods and Tools to Successfully Build and Engage Human Cohorts appeared first on Vibrent.

Nearly all people with multiple myeloma have early warning signs called “precursor conditions.” Health leaders like the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, one of the world’s leading centers of cancer research and treatment, can better treat this condition if it is detected early, and therefore reduce mortality. Now with their recent announcement about the ambitious PROMISE study, Dana-Farber aims to make multiple myeloma a cancer that is preventable.

By collecting and analyzing data from people who test positive for the early precursor conditions, Dana-Farber will be able to study people before they develop the condition, in order to discover how to better treat – and ultimately prevent – this deadly cancer.

A study of this magnitude requires extensive data collection, as well as an approach to enroll and engage participants from communities traditionally under-represented in biomedical and clinical research. To achieve these aims, Dana-Farber chose to collaborate with Vibrent Health, a digital technology company known for its innovation in precision medicine research solutions and providing researchers a better way to provide eConsent and collect data across electronic medical records, genomics, wearables, surveys, and more.

Dana-Farber will use Vibrent’s platform for informed eConsent to enroll a highly diverse pool of research participants nationwide. Dana-Farber study staff will also use Vibrent’s platform to perform novel data collection through virtual methods and computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI).

The Research Institute will implement patient engagement through Vibrent’s robust privacy-protecting participant portal and comprehensive researcher tools, as well as provide educational content that can be personalized to the patient’s specific and unique needs.

“Using this technology to interact directly with our study participants is so powerful,” said the study’s principal investigator Irene Ghobrial, MD, of Dana-Farber. “Not only will this improve the quality of the research we are able to conduct, but it puts the tools in our participants hands to help us make multiple myeloma a preventable disease.”

For Vibrent Health, this partnership builds on the company’s commitment to improving research data and health outcomes for traditionally underrepresented populations in clinical research.

“Clinical research has long faced limitations because of the available participants,” said Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “Our solutions remove the barriers – whether they are a person’s location, internet connectivity, or physical limitations – so they can contribute to the important work of researchers. By including their data, researchers can create health outcomes that better help these populations.”

The PROMISE Study is currently enrolling participants with a target goal of 30,000 individual participants nationwide, in order to identify 3,000 with the precursor conditions. The resulting dataset will help Dana-Farber to identify the factors that are associated with disease progression and develop potential methods for prevention.

“Five years ago, we told people with precursor conditions of the disease to watch and wait until they experienced symptoms,” said Ghobrial. “By empowering our community, we are understanding who is most likely to develop multiple myeloma in their lifetime and where early interception can be most effective”.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from 1 million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

The post Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Selects Vibrent Health’s Next-Generation Digital Health Research Platform to Enable Early Detection for the Prevention of Multiple Myeloma appeared first on Vibrent.

FAIRFAX, Va., June 22, 2022 – – Vibrent Health, a health technology startup powering the future of precision health research, today announced that the company’s Digital Health Research Platform will serve as the technology backbone of My Healthy Maryland Precision Medicine Research, a joint initiative of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the University of Maryland Medical Center and Medical System. The project launched on June 21 and aims to enroll 250,000 diverse Maryland residents over the next decade.  

The study will utilize Vibrent Health’s Digital Health Research Platform, which features tools to recruit and engage diverse research cohorts, enable genomic studies and collect data from surveys, biosamples, electronic health records, wearables and other sources to create novel data sets.

“Through partnerships with leading institutions like University of Maryland Medicine, we are dedicated to bringing the latest data-driven digital methods to precision health research,” said Praduman “PJ” Jain, CEO and founder of Vibrent Health. “We are committed to constantly innovating digital tools that make it easier and faster for researchers to enroll participants and collect novel study data that can accelerate discoveries and advance precision medicine.”

The strategic relationship with Vibrent Health allows University of Maryland Medicine to leverage Vibrent’s unique digital health research expertise and its end-to-end digital health research platform to create a large distributed longitudinal cohort and augment genomics data with phenotypic information to draw insights about an individual’s health. These insights may help health care providers to identify risks earlier and prevent or mitigate diseases for individuals and communities.

A particular focus of the study will be on underserved populations in Maryland who experience significant health disparities. The large-scale effort to collect broad sources of health data can aid researchers in better understanding how lifestyle and human genomic variation can affect an individual’s health.

The Digital Health Research Platform used by My Healthy Maryland is the same platform developed by Vibrent Health as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, a precision health research initiative which aims to enroll one million participants. To date, the scalable platform has enabled the enrollment of more than 670,000 health research participants, with 80 percent of participants identifying as individuals who are underrepresented in biomedical research.

“Having accessible digital research tools that can reach participants wherever they are is key to inclusion of populations that often are not part of health research,” said study co-leader Alan Shuldiner, MD, John L. Whitehurst Professor of Medicine and Associate Dean for Personalized & Genomic Medicine at UMSOM. “Having a diverse participant base that represents the diversity of our communities in Maryland is essential to precision health research, so that researchers will better understand how to predict, prevent, detect and treat disease in different people.”

Study participants will get periodic overall reports on the study’s progress. They will also have the opportunity to enroll in ancillary research studies and sub-studies.  In the future, researchers also hope to offer study participants the opportunity to learn about their own genetic variations that may warrant follow-up medical evaluation.

“Using Vibrent’s digital health research tools, we can support a mutually beneficial partnership between participants and researchers, which promotes participant engagement,” said study principal investigator Stephen Davis, MBBS, FRCP, FACE, MACP, Theodore E. Woodward  Professor and Chair of the Department of Medicine at UMSOM, and Director, Institute for Clinical and Translational Research and Vice President of Clinical Translational Science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. “Through communication tools embedded in the digital research platform, we can keep in touch with participants and share results and updates with them through the lifecycle of the study.”

Interested participants can get more information and enroll at www.marylandprecisionhealth.org.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2016, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. This work is supported under NIH funding award  3OT2OD030043. To learn more, visit  vibrenthealth.com.

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“Our findings show that using technology to screen for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases is comparable in accuracy to an in-home antigen test and is widely accessible for the general population and especially for those with limited access to health care options,” said Praduman “PJ” Jain, CEO, Vibrent Health. “With more equitable access to screening and testing for diverse populations, these tools could help reduce some of the disparities we saw during the worst waves of the COVID pandemic, when communities of color were hardest hit.”

The screening tool is powered by Vibrent’s Digital Health Research Platform, which is the consumer-facing technology platform used by the NIH All of Us Research Program, a U.S. precision health research initiative that aims to accelerate medical discoveries. The COVID-19 screening tool was a particular use case for the flexible platform, which is primarily used for longitudinal research.

The digital screening tool was funded by NIH under a contract with National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB) and the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Vibrent Health was selected to develop innovative digital technologies to address immediate public health needs related to the pandemic, with a focus on solutions for medically underserved communities and people with limited access to health care, who were disproportionally affected by COVID-19. Vibrent collaborated with George Mason University to develop algorithms using machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. This AI/ML enabled tool was scientifically validated through studies conducted by Vibrent in collaboration with Virginia Commonwealth University.

“Digital health technologies built around smartphones and wearable devices will play an essential role in guiding us through the COVID-19 pandemic,” said NIBIB Director Bruce J. Tromberg, Ph.D. “These platforms can acquire large amounts of data from many different sources spanning from testing technologies to sensors. When this information is analyzed using cutting-edge computational and machine learning methods, everyone will have access to powerful new tools for reducing the risk of infection and returning to normal activities.”

“The accuracy of digital tools in predicting the likelihood of infection show that these tools can be a valuable resource for individuals and public health officials to help stop the spread of infectious disease,” said Co-Investigator F. Gerard Moeller, M.D., Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Pharmacology and Toxicology, and Neurology at VCU. “These tools represent what could be a digital infrastructure for future pandemics that provides real-time feedback for healthcare systems and public health decision making.”

In the study, researchers collected data from over 850 research participants who were recently exposed to COVID-19, recently experienced COVID-19 symptoms, or were asymptomatic.

Using the online screening tool, participants responded to surveys, including questions about an array of possible symptoms. This data was scored factoring in local prevalence and demographics, along with millions of datapoints from NIH, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and state and local health departments information on COVID-19 to determine the likelihood of COVID-19 infection.

Researchers found that the digital screening tool was highly accurate and that computerized symptom screening could either improve, or in some situations replace, in-home antigen tests for COVID-19. The accuracy was tested by comparing these self-reported digital screening results against results of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which detect genetic material from a virus and are considered the gold standard for COVID-19 testing.

Participants in the study took two at-home COVID-19 tests and a PCR test performed by a health care professional, in addition to using the digital symptom screener. Out of 100 patients who had COVID-19, 58.7% were correctly identified as infected by the first in-home test. The addition of computerized symptom screening to the first in-home tests added an additional 11.1% to the sensitivity of predictions, suggesting that the symptom screening makes in-home tests more sensitive.

The results also showed that adding computerized symptom screening is a better way to increase sensitivity of the first in-home test than adding another in-home test thus saving costs to health care systems and public health. Combining the first in-home test with computerized symptom screening identified 70% of COVID-19 positive cases. Studies of point-of-care antigen tests alone have found that when not administered by health care professionals and subject to common consumer errors when testing, more than one-third of infected people would be expected to return a negative result and one-fifth of healthy people would be incorrectly identified as infected.

Other significant findings of the study were that AI-powered web and mobile based symptom screening improves in-home testing accuracy by at least 10%, detects COVID-19 sooner, which could prevent unintentional transmission, and reduces the potential for a false negative result by 2.44%. Based on the U.S. population of 330 million, this means that by implementing this technology potentially more than 8 million cases of COVID-19 could be prevented if infected individuals were aware of their status and took measures to decrease the risk of transmission to family, friends and their community.

The digital screening tool was designed for large-scale use, for potential deployment across the United States by government agencies, health care systems, large companies, airlines and other public transportation, schools and universities, event venues and others, including the general public, who need a way to safely, quickly, affordably and reliably screen people for infectious diseases.

In the past, many consumers have not had the capability to report their test results to public health officials when taking in-home tests. Vibrent Health’s digital screening tool offers a mechanism for users to report their infection status, which could potentially help officials track outbreaks in order to advise the public on mitigation strategies to reduce their exposure and prevent the spread of disease.

Curbing the spread of contagious diseases could significantly reduce the devastating impacts to people and the economy. According to JAMA, the cumulative financial costs of the COVID-19 pandemic related to lost labor output and health reduction are estimated at more than $16 trillion, or approximately 90% of the annual gross domestic product of the U.S.

“With early detection and proper isolating measures enabled by digital screening and testing, we could spare millions of people from human suffering, and we could significantly lessen the cost of disease outbreaks to society and our health care system,” said Jain.

About Vibrent Health
Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2016, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. This work is supported under NIH funding award 3OT2OD030043. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

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“Until now, over 90% of participants from large genomics studies have been of European descent. The lack of diversity in research has hindered scientific discovery,” said Josh Denny, M.D., chief executive officer of the All of Us Research Program. “All of Us participants are leading the way toward more equitable representation in medical research through their involvement. And this is just the beginning. Over time, as we expand our data and add new tools, this dataset will become an indispensable resource for health research.”

The Participant Technology Systems Center is the platform that facilitates participant consent to donate their biosamples. It also provides the participants access to their genomics results from the program to participants. The PTSC platform collects required digital health data including clinical, lifestyle, and wearable data that is used in conjunction with participants’ genomic data for precision health research.  The Vibrent Health Digital Health Research Platform provides capabilities for eConsent, online-anywhere access, multi-language capabilities, computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), appointment scheduling for biospecimens, and easy-to-understand language and interfaces to help researchers recruit and engage diverse participants. 

“Providing diverse genomic data to researchers represents a significant step forward for the field of genomics and digital health research and will ultimately advance health equity,” said Praduman “PJ” Jain, CEO of Vibrent Health. “The technology advances in health research have helped to make participation easier and more accessible for many people and communities.” 

Historically, many communities, including racial and ethnic minorities, those who live in rural areas, and LGBTQ+ people, have often been left out of biomedical research. Because of this, researchers and health providers know less about the health of those historically underrepresented populations, resulting in potentially less effective prevention and treatment strategies. 

As with all data in the Researcher Workbench, no direct participant identifiers are included, to protect participant privacy. To get access, researchers must get sign-off from their institutions, complete training, and sign agreements for responsible data use. Once registered, researchers can use the data for a wide range of studies. 

“A unique feature of advanced digital health research tools is the broad accessibility of data to researchers wherever they are,” said Jain. “Technology has made it easier for researchers to share data and collaborate, which is a benefit to all of science.” 

About Vibrent Health 

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2016, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. This work is supported under NIH funding award U24OD02316. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

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“Vibrent Health’s core mission is to innovate the way cohort research is conducted,” said Praduman Jain, CEO, Vibrent Health. “This next new phase of our platform represents a critical leap forward for cohort programs that seek to incorporate ancillary studies into their research. By accelerating the addition of existing novel participant experiences, research protocols and data collection methods, we can empower our partners to supplement the primary Digital Health Research Platform with other leading digital health research technologies.”

Vibrent Health’s Digital Health Research Platform serves as the participant-facing technology platform of the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, a precision health initiative that aims to enroll one million people. Vibrent Health entered its sixth year as the Participant Technology Systems Center for All of Us with recent funding of $39.17M for 2021, and NIH recently announced the PTSC’s support of the Nutrition for Precision Health initiative, the first major ancillary study of All of Us.

“Nutrition for Precision Health is just the first opportunity to leverage this standardized approach for ancillary studies,” said Mark Begale, vice president of Vibrent Health, PTSC Program PI. “Our Ancillary Studies Tool Suite will also support the program’s critical aims of enabling remote identity verification, cognitive testing and more.”

The Ancillary Studies Tool Suite has been designed to address the most common challenges that face longitudinal cohorts seeking to foster an ecosystem of academic and industry partners to empower innovative data collection. In addition to the critical software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces (APIs) that standardize the process of collecting data from traditionally disparate technologies, the suite enables participant experiences to be seamlessly embedded in ongoing research.

“The Ancillary Studies Tool Suite enables both experience developers and data integration partners to share data from their systems. These tools provide an on-ramp for existing digital health research to find new life in large cohort studies,” said Dave Klein, Vibrent Health chief product officer.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

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The post Vibrent Health to Launch Integrated Platform for Ancillary Studies in Large-Cohort Digital Health Research appeared first on Vibrent.

The NPH program will build on recent advances in biomedical science – including artificial intelligence (AI), genetics and microbiome research – and will be the first ancillary study to leverage the large and diverse All of Us cohort and its existing data and infrastructure.  The NPH program will add valuable data about the dietary habits of participants to the All of Us Research Program and use modern data mining techniques to develop and validate algorithms for clinical application.

“Our technology and expertise enable the NPH and the All of Us Research Program’s nationwide network of health research partners to recruit, electronically consent, engage and support the diverse participants of the precision nutrition cohort,” said Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “We came together around a common mission – to help people to utilize their personal data to improve health.”

Vibrent Health’s technology provides the data collection and engagement platform that will enable the data to be used to:

• Examine individual differences observed in response to different diets by studying the interactions between diet, genes, proteins, microbiome, metabolism and other individual contextual factors
• Use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop algorithms to predict individual responses to foods and dietary patterns
• Validate algorithms for clinical application

Using Vibrent’s DHS Platform, researchers will collect broad datasets on multiple potential predictive factors and combine it with existing data in the All of Us database to develop a more complete picture of how individuals respond to different foods or dietary routines.

“With the introduction of the Nutrition for Precision Health initiative, the All of Us Research Program is reaching an exciting new stage for a large cohort program. As the Participant Technology System Center (PTSC) for NIH All of us, Vibrent Health is in the critical position of delivering advanced technologies enabling researchers to remotely engage with diverse cohorts at a national scale. Together we’ll collect unique valuable datasets and support participants in ways that would not be possible without our advanced digital tools,” said Vibrent Health Vice President Mark Begale.  

“Data-driven and tailored health is the future,” says Jain. “Precision health research is key to helping individuals achieve optimal health through solutions designed to take into account data about many aspects of health, including fitness, mental well-being, sleep, diet and metabolic health based on their biology and individual needs.”

All of Us andNutrition for Precision Health, powered by the All of Us Research Program,are service marks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The Vibrent Health award is supported by NIH Common Fund  supplement 1 OT2 OD030043-01S8.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

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“EHR data provides a valuable asset to health researchers,” explained Mark Begale, vice president, Vibrent Health. “It provides critical missing pieces to clinical and cohort researchers looking to understand the holistic health of their research participants.”

The EHR integration tool has already been deployed as part of the Vibrent Digital Health Platform.  It is ready for use by large and small cohort research studies for longitudinal data collection for those participants who have authorized access to their EHR.

When a health research participant consents to sharing their EHR for research, Vibrent Health’s EHR tool enables researchers to access a wealth of health data via the DHS Platform.  This medical history can include information about illness, treatments, medications, lab results and other health-related information that can provide a more comprehensive and accurate picture of a research participant’s health than data that is collected by many researchers today.

“Our platform’s EHR integration is built using emerging standard of HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) to give researchers the ability to clinical records of various participants and combine with other data sources,” says Vibrent Health CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “Reusing health data streamlines clinical research to reduce transcription errors, improve research protocols and patient participation and provide the real-world evidence needed to accelerate health research and enhance drug safety and early identification.”

EHR data used in health research can provide the necessary information that researchers need to inform the outcome of their research. Access to EHR data provides a critical foundation to informing patient safety, research and treatment efficacy, patient-centered outcomes,  timeliness, efficiency and equity.

“Integration with EHR enables researchers to get access to information that may have been impossible to collect in the past. Our EHR integration engine represents one more tool we provide that could be the key to researchers making scientific discoveries,” says Begale.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health develops digital health technology and research tools for health organizations, researchers and research participants. Powering the next generation of precision medicine, Vibrent’s scalable technology platform for individual and population health provides actionable insights to help accelerate medical discoveries. Vibrent Health is proud to serve, since 2017, as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. To learn more, visit  vibrenthealth.com.

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