The National Trauma Research Repository (NTRR) is a key piece of the national research infrastructure supporting the trauma research environment. Through the NTRR, investigators can contribute their own clinical research data and access stored data for secondary analyses.
Initially developed by the Coalition for National Trauma Research (CNTR) in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health Center for Information Technology and the Combat Casualty Care Research Program, and with funding from the Department of Defense, the NTRR is now accessible via the Federal Interagency Traumatic Brain Injury Research Informatics System (FITBIR).
The NTRR provides trauma researchers with a powerful tool to conduct exploratory analyses of shared data sets, create and implement a data sharing plan, adopt common data elements (CDEs) for study data dictionaries, and meet the data sharing requirements of medical journals and federal funding agencies.
The NTRR enables researchers to explore the many critical gaps in our knowledge regarding how to treat people who sustain traumatic injuries—such as the best combination of blood products to administer in a pre-hospital environment, the most effective interventions for preventing injury in various settings, and the most efficacious alternatives to opioids for managing pain and sedation, to name just a few. Use of the NTRR will help address these and many other important questions as investigators seek to improve outcomes for trauma patients.
The system is a combination of modules that support the sharing of subject-level de-identified data, rather than summaries or interpretations of this information. Sharing data, methodologies, and associated tools – rather than summaries or interpretations – can accelerate research progress by allowing re-analysis of data, as well as re-aggregation, integration, and rigorous comparison with other data, tools, and methods. This community-wide sharing requires common data definitions and standards, as well as comprehensive and coherent informatics approaches.
Research repositories provide a multitude of benefits. They can:
- Facilitate the publication of new research using existing data, expanding the return on investments made in clinical trials
- Enable replication of findings
- Minimize the need to recruit patients for research studies, as secondary analyses may answer more research questions than originally asked
- Minimize delays, duplications, inefficiencies and costs related to conducting disparate and uncoordinated research
- Speed knowledge translation, enhancing the development of evidence-based trauma care practices
- Meet requirements for data sharing tendered by medical journals and funding sources
- Support transfer of research and knowledge between military and civilian researchers and care providers
- Support exploratory analyses to use in research grant applications
- Provide access to data that would otherwise be difficult and expensive to collect due to challenges in conducting research in emergency situations.
For more information or to sign up for NTRR email alerts, contact: Research@Nattrauma.org