Project Background
In 2017, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute (HPHCI) was selected by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) through the FDA-Catalyst program to lead the development of a mobile application, called FDA MyStudies, that would facilitate the collection of real-world data directly from patients to support clinical trials, observational studies, and registries. The effort was funded by an award to FDA scientific staff from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund which is administered by the Associate Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) of the Department of Health and Human Services. Harvard Pilgrim selected the mobile application development firm Boston Technology Corporation (BTC) and LabKey as their development partners for the project. BTC was tasked with developing a user friendly mobile interface while LabKey was tasked with building a secure back-end storage environment for collected data.
Why Labkey
LabKey Server was selected as the back-end data management solution for this project for a number of key reasons, one of which being the platform’s flexible, science-specific architecture. With the project’s long-term goal of expanding the use of real-world data across research programs, the application framework needed to support a broad range of potential healthcare topics through configuration as opposed to requiring development for each new project.
LabKey Server also stood out as an ideal solution because of the platform’s ability to handle PHI/PII data in a manner compliant with HIPAA and FISMA regulations. Finally, one of the project requirements outlined by the FDA was that the resulting application and storage architecture would need to be made available as open source to the scientific community. LabKey Server, an open source platform licensed under Apache 2.0, was able to support this distribution model without any changes to the existing licensing model.