Master Agreement: R24 for the CFAR-Network for the Integrated Clinical Sciences, CNICS

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Investigator: Steven Deeks, MD
Sponsor: University of Alabama System

Location(s): United States

Description

The CFAR Network of Integrated Clinical Systems (CNICS) was funded in Sept 2006 as an R24 award to provide a research infrastructure to support HIV clinical outcomes research. The national center is based at the University of Alabama.

The objective of the CNICS project is to integrate clinical data from the large and diverse population of HIV-infected persons in the modern HAART era who are receiving care at one of the many U.S. federally funded Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) sites. The nine participating sites comprise a diverse cohort of more than 15,000 patients.

The CNICS project is the first electronic medical records (EMR)-based resource network to contribute to the contemporary HIV research agenda. This provides a unique opportunity to investigate questions related to HIV disease management that cannot be readily addressed through traditional randomized controlled clinical trials and other cohort studies.

The nine CNICS sites include: Case Western Reserve University, University of Alabama at Birmingham, University of California, San Francisco, the University of Washington, the University of California, San Diego, Fenway Community Health Center of Harvard University, University of North Carolina, Vanderbilt University, and Johns Hopkins University (JHU). Although the JHU site is no longer CFAR-funded, we have continued to collaborate with the site and develop practices for including new sites into the CNICS project.

Investigators with expertise in basic, clinical, translational, and epidemiologic research, in addition to medical informatics, are collaborating and contributing to the CNICS project.