Collaboration is critical to address many research questions in clinical and translational sciences. There has been extensive interest from CDRNs, PPRNs, community partners, academia in general, and private industry to collaborate with the Greater Plains Collaborative CDRN.

Collaboration Overview

Collaboration Activities include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Development and validation of computable phenotypes (algorithms to identify patients)
• Prep to Research activities such as obtaining counts for feasibility or sample size estimates
• Research on de-identified and limited electronic health record data
• Identification of patients across the Greater Plains Collaborative CDRN
• Contact of potential study subjects through phone, email, and other modalities
• Survey Research
• Observational research
• Pragmatic clinical research
• Hypothesis Generation
• Stakeholder Engagement (Patients/Families, Clinicians, Clinics, etc)
• Health Information Technology support for patient-facing studies
  • Electronic survey
  • Electronic payment
  • Electronic decision support for trial delivery

Collaboration as a Researcher

Please reference the GPC Resource Guide for Investigators. 

GPC Citation Information

Greater Plains Collaborative Data and Informatics Environment Pricing

GPC Infrastructure Cost Recovery

In alignment with national PCORnet policy, GPC will assess a 10% Network Access Fee (NAF) per year on total direct costs of the award for the portion that uses GPC resources for Non-Profit/Academic projects. This is required in order to support and maintain the GPC data and informatics infrastructure so resources will be sustained on an ongoing basis.  Additionally, a portion of this fee will go towards providing patient engagement.  Pricing and governance for commercial projects is not yet established and will be handled on a project-by-project basis.

GPC Products and Services

Analysis as a Product

• The GPC offers analysis services that are priced with hourly rates depending on personnel type required, and the level of complexity of the project. Rates range from $85 to $250 per hour. 
• Examples would include developing a computable phenotype for a study population, an analysis package in SAS/SQL/R, distributing the analysis to sites, site analyses execution, and aggregation of responses from the sites for the investigator.
• The pricing is based on Non-Profit/Academic rates and will be adapted as necessary for commercial projects. Analysis rate will apply for coordination, query development and validation, data aggregation and assembly, query run against GPC Data Marts, and IRB approval.

Data as a Product

• The GPC offers data as a product at different price points depending on the type of data needed for non-profit collaborators such as the NIH or NLM and will apply when shipping data to a client. These prices will include data coordination, IRB and contracting, and site selection for lead site and participating sites.
• Pricing assumes a well-defined computable phenotype, but if one does not exist or needs to be developed, analysis rates will apply. The prices are for PCORnet Common Data Model tables of a site level cohort size of less than 150k, but pricing for larger cohorts can be evaluated.  Additional specialty data tables such as tumor registries can also be obtained at additional cost.
• There are also a range of baseline costs for legal activities as the effort differs based on lead or participating sites. The effort will be reduced based on use of the GPC External Institution Collaborator Agreement. Limited or identified data will have increased costs due to IRB oversight.

Prospective trials and registries

• For prospective trials and surveys, activities and thus costs may vary considering.  We can help investigators consider the following categories:
  
  • Contracting and regulatory:
    • Contracting and start-up
    • Close out
    • Use of GPC EICA
  • Milestone Payments
    • Patient Recruitment
    • Enrollment Milestone Incentives
    • Study Specific Engagement
    • CDM Query
    • Upfront funds may also be required to launch a trial and these would be study specific

Analysis against Integrated EHR and Claims as a product

• The GPC also has a unique capability: GROUSE (Greater Plains Collaborative Reusable Observable Unified Study Environment) available for use by investigators. GROUSE is a  centralized, integrated, and de-identified data warehouse containing state-wide fee for service health insurance claims from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services linked to the PCORnet CDM data and i2b2 data repositories from each GPC site that contain EHR, billing and tumor registry data.  Grouse has over 20 million beneficiaries and over 10 million GPC patients. The environment holds zipcodes to American community survey linkages for sociodemographics, as well as the Social Security Death Index.

Discovery Services

The GPC offers a couple services to help develop projects. These services are as follows:

• Babel: These are ontologies across multiple i2b2 instances with counts of the number of patients or patients/facts recorded at each note and stored in an i2b2 instance. Please acknowledge PCORnet and CTSA funding when seeking collaborators and attribute on academic products and initiatives, and also please do not redistribute data without permission.
• Almost all GPC sites participate in the CTSA NCATS ACT SHRINE network: This i2b2 based network allows investigators to obtain feasibility counts from their computer in real time across over 40 participating institutions.  This is free for investigators at CTSAs and ACT participating institutions.  Contact your local informatics team for further information or our GPC project management office.
• If you are developing a large proposal that leads to significant sustainability for the GPC, GPC sites are willing to conduct preliminary feasibility analyses on a case-by-case basis after review by the GPC Research Opportunity Assessment team.

For more detailed information on GPC Collaboration pricing as well as letters of support, please refer to the following presentation, which also includes specific rates associated with the various activities as well as examples of cost breakdown for various types of collaboration:

Greater Plains Collaborative Pricing Breakdown

Submitting Grants Leveraging the Greater Plains Collaborative CDRN

Please feel free to use the following templates for Letters of Support, Grant Submissions leveraging the GPC, and Budget Justifications for developing your GPC CDRN project proposal budget. 

• Letter of Support Template Language
• Grant Template Language
• Budget Justification Template Language

Data Request Information

• Please visit our Researcher Resources page to learn how to submit requests for feasibility counts, de-identified data, or limited data

  • Submit a Greater Plains Collaborative CDRN Research Opportunity Assessment Request

  • Submit a Response to a PCORnet Front Door Collaboration Request (for GPC Investigators)

Site Level Data Characterization

• All GPC sites participate in the PCORnet Common Data Model (CDM). Portions of each sites data characterization report have been uploaded on our site level data characterization page. This will give researchers an overview of the data at each site. 

SHRINE Information

• To search for feasibility counts across the Greater Plains Collaborative, please visit our SNOW SHRINE page. 

GROUSE Information

• GROUSE (Greater Plains Collaborative Reusable Observable Unified Study Environment) is a GPC project to obtain health insurance claims, please visit our GROUSE page to learn more about this rich data. 

I2B2 Information

• All sites in the Greater Plains Collaborative have an i2b2 based repository. The University of Kansas Medical Center has numerous trainings. Please see our Guide to using HERON.

IRB Information 

All of our GPC institutions have signed on to SMART IRB.

PCRF Collaboration

In order to understand the total PCORnet collaborators available, please reference this table of networks and PIs:

Collaboration as a Patient

The Greater Plains Collaborative is funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, and as such we are always trying to involve patients in our activities as much as possible. We need patient collaborators to attend our events, help plan our studies, and to guide the direction we take as a network. If you are a patient who wishes to collaborate with the GPC as a Patient Advisor, please visit our Patient Resources page to see ways you can get involved.

GPC Logos to Download

• GPC Logo with Greater Prairie Chicken
• Cartoon Greater Prairie Chicken Mascot PDF

GPC Process Flowcharts

• GPC Front Door Intake Process Flowchart
• GPC ROA Process Flowchart