How can Leaf help biomedical research?¶

Clinical databases are often the starting point for gathering data for nearly any kind biomedical research, whether in assessing feasibility of clinical trials, prep to research, retrospective research, or data science and machine learning. It's also often the case that academic medical centers have many more brilliant researchers, clinicians, and trainees eager to test hypotheses and use data than there are informaticians able to extract it.

Leaf is a simple drag-and-drop web application that queries clinical databases, so users can focus on accomplishing research, not waiting for data.

As an example, imagine a young researcher interested in studying low platelet counts in children diagnosed with congenital anomalies. She's interested in learning about patients at her institution, but may not have the funding to pay to extract the data, or the time to wait in line to request it.

With just Leaf and her laptop, it's easy for her to find the criteria:

Make a query:

And find her answer:

Results¶

While Leaf can't solve every clinical data problem, it has enabled and helped hundreds of research and quality improvement projects at our institution, all while reducing the overall maintenance and support burden for our informatics teams. Here are a few projects that used Leaf: