We are very sad to report that Chelsea Jenter, Project Director of the CRN, left Seattle on Wednesday, February 2nd to move back to Boston! Chelsea was a tremendous asset to the CRN.

Chelsea will be working on an AHRQ-funded grant evaluating a multi-community implementation of electronic medical records. The evaluation will include both patient and provider experiences.

Chelsea and her fiance Ed Kim plan to marry on June 25th. Best wishes to her in her new position at Brigham and Womens Hospital, and in her upcoming marriage. The CRN family will greatly miss her!

-Maurleen Davidson, GHC

RE-PORT-LAND:
CRN Site Visits its Neighbor to the South

Although Kaiser Permanente Northwest is the closest site geographically to the PI's office, the stars didn't align for a site visit until November 2004. Ed, Gene, Chelsea and Sarah had an enjoyable and productive trip to the KP Center for Health Research. The main agenda items were to review the progress of projects, learn more about the unique work of the medical informatics researchers at KPNW, and to discuss synergies between the CRN and the newest HMO Research Network consortium, the Coordinated Clinical Studies Network (CCSN).

Ed used this site visit as an opportunity to unveil a new CRN overview presentation that is focused on the CRN's interconnected data resources. The Virtual Data Warehouse (VDW) has grown exponentially during the CRN's second funding cycle, and it is important for all CRN investigators to understand the content and applicability of the VDW, and give consideration to how the VDW could be used in grant applications and projects.

We had terrific turnout for this site visit, with over 20 CHR investigators and staff members in attendance throughout the day. The visit gave us a clearer understanding of the nuances of CHR as a research center, and provided new insights about the unique role that medical informatics (specifically, natural language processing and electronic medical records) can play in our efforts to improve healthcare through research applications.

With the Fall 2004 award of the CCSN contract to the HMO Research Network (HMORN), many recent discussions have focused on how the various HMORN consortia interact. A tangible example is the use of the web as a utility for internal communications. Thus, the site visit included discussions about whether and how we could achieve as much commonality--and as little duplication of effort--as possible across these networks, since CHR is developing and hosting the CRN intranet, as well as the CCSN intranet. A common web portal, used to access a common HMORN Virtual Data Warehouse, as well as each consortium's pages, is one strategy under consideration. Clearly, the need to preserve a high level of security while striving for interoperability, is a paramount consideration. In future CRN communications we will keep every-one apprised of new developments on this front.

The web team at CHR also furnished some interesting web statistics during our site visit. From January to November 2004, the CRN website was "hit"over 12,600 times by 222 users. The contact search is among the most popular pages visited.

We're grateful to the Portland group for an informative and well-attended day of meetings.

-Sarah Greene, GHC

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