ADVANCE stands for: Accelerating Data Value Across a National Community Health Center Network.
ADVANCE aims to:
- Integrate outpatient, hospital, and community-level data into a single data management system
- Expand efforts to engage patients and clinicians who contribute to the design, implementation, and interpretation of comparative effectiveness research
- Develop electronic systems for recruiting study participants and collecting patient-reported data
- Strengthen the infrastructure of our community academic partnerships to support patient-centered outcomes research, and support Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) to become learning health systems
- Build the capacity of our FQHC networks to meet research regulatory requirements
ADVANCE partners include:
- OCHIN, Inc.
- Health Choice Network, Inc.
- Fenway Health
- Oregon Health and Science University Department of Family Medicine
Our data includes patients in both Medicaid and non-Medicaid expansion states and represents a large, diverse patient population particularly with regard to race and ethnicity. ADVANCE also includes a large portion of patients in poverty. For more information visit our ADVANCE Data page.
Because ADVANCE is bringing together data on several million patients, it is critical that the data are protected and kept confidential. ADVANCE is committed to assuring the privacy, security, and confidentiality of health data and ensuring that the data are used appropriately. ADVANCE protects patient confidentiality and minimizes risks by following HIPAA privacy practices, enforcing data use and sharing policies, having all research activities reviewed by an Institutional Review Board, and securing the physical network and data storage. In addition, all patients receive a notice of privacy practices to inform them about how their data are used by participating community health centers for research purposes.
All data stored in the ADVANCE Research Data Warehouse (RDW) are de-identified. Crosswalks to actual patient identifiers are kept in a secure location for patient de-duplication during data loads and for use by analytical staff as needed for approved protocols (e.g., re-identification for a clinical trial).