Medical Informatics with the All of Us Program at the University of Kansas Medical Center

By Kelly Hale, Communications Coordinator

Apr 23, 2024

Diego Mazzotti, Ph.D., has been using biobanks linked to electronic health records, for his research for years, and is now assisting others in how to use resources from the All of Us Research Program to help with their research.

“When I was at the University of Pennsylvania, I was working on a study that was looking at the genetics of sleep disorders,” he said. “And the UK Biobank was a resource that allowed us to ask some relevant questions to a very large data set. They had 500,000 participants enrolled and they all had genetic data.”

Survey questions regarding sleep, sleep duration, and sleep symptoms were asked in that resource, and about 20% of participants also had accelerometer data to estimate rest-activity patterns. The data was used in his study through the UK Biobank. Mazzotti and his collaborators were able to publish some papers on their research and this really piqued his interest in becoming more involved with large biobanks.

Which has now led him to work on the All of Us program, which uses large data sets, to not only help with his research but to help others.

“I started to explore the data and became really interested in how their cohort builder works to create datasets,” he said. “It is impressive in terms of how simple it is to use, and they have this platform called Researcher Workbench, which allows researchers to access this data after they complete their training (Mazzotti is hosting workshops for the University of Kansas Medical Center community).

“As I explored the data, I realized this could be a mentorship opportunity and I looked into the All of Us Research Scholars Program, and I was matched with mentees. The program matches the mentee to a mentor who has experience using big datasets.”

With new mentees to assist with executing some research studies, Mazzotti began training Soniya Mishra, a research analyst in Medical Informatics to get her familiar with the Researcher Workbench. As he worked through the training with Mishra and his mentees, he started thinking about how they could expand the training to help other researchers.

“I started having conversations with Olivia Veatch, Mariana Ramírez, Christina Baker and others about how we could offer something with some structure,” said Mazzotti. “A panel discussion about resources available through the All of Us program was then organized by Peter Smith, who invited researchers at KU Medical Center already using the All of Us data in their research. We’ve then added workshops to really help with training people to show them the resources they will have access to through this program.” The recording to the panel discussion can be found here.

Mazzotti is starting with a workshop to introduce the Researcher Workbench and the capabilities of the program with datasets (like what types of data are available), and then will move to more advanced workshops later, which will be more data analysis oriented.

As training continues on the All of Us program resources, Mazzotti and his colleagues in the KU Medical Center Medical Informatics division can help other researchers work with large datasets.

Kelly Hale

Communications Coordinator

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