Thank you for your interest in the Department of Clinical Research Informatics (DCRI). We are located in the Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. The Clinical Center is the nation's clinical research hospital and the world's largest hospital dedicated totally to clinical research. Our department is responsible for the analysis, design, implementation, maintenance, and evaluation of the Clinical Research Information Systems (CRIS).

CRIS touches virtually everyone at the Clinical Center in one way or another. Whether it is to document patient care, retrieve data or analyze trends, we all need to access clinical and research information to assist in our work and help achieve the mission of the NIH to improve the health of the nation. As users have become more familiar with CRIS, we find ourselves with continuous customer requests for increased functionality and improved services - which is a good thing. The comfort level our users are achieving has been rewarding to watch and the interdisciplinary initiatives to improve our computer systems increase daily. DCRI strives to provide all system users an industry-standard network architecture that is accessible (on and off site), efficient, reliable, and secure.  Our focus is to make CRIS increasingly user-friendly while establishing it as the central location for all patient-related clinical information. Our ultimate goal is to achieve a fully functional Electronic Patient Record. This goal will require a great deal of interface development to bring outside system data into CRIS, designing and building documents to replace current paper forms, enhancing current functionality to support more efficient workflow processes and providing links from CRIS that will allow easy access to frequently used references and resources.

To help us reach our goals, I have created a new Project Management Office within DCRI to provide the necessary planning and monitoring infrastructure required for each project to be conducted,  utilizing a standard framework to help assure success. With the many projects planned for the future, a formal structure for planning, executing and evaluating our work is imperative.

Jon W. McKeeby, Chief Information Officer,
National Institutes of Health, Clinical Center
Department of Clinical Research Informatics

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