Infrastructure: Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium (IPMC)

The Illinois Precision Medicine Consortium (IPMC) represents 3 major Chicago-area academic institutions (Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois at Chicago) and their healthcare provider organization (HPO) partners. In this multi-PI, multi-site application, we present our approach to serving in the Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) Cohort Program as an HPO Enrollment Center. Our overall scientific goal is to recruit and examine a large and diverse cohort of individuals across all age groups from both sexes, including both healthy people and those with pre-existing diseases (without regard to specific disease type), and to follow them through innovative mobile health technologies, electronic health records (EHR), and health insurance claims data to enable linkage of genetic and environmental exposures with a broad array of health outcomes. The consortium brings together extensive preexisting research resources across the 3 academic institutions, as well as the widespread, yet geographically distinct, service areas of their HPO partners representing numerous ethnically and socioeconomically diverse Chicago and Illinois communities. Specific Aims are (for the UG3 Phase, Year 01): Aim 1. Study goals: Recruit, consent, examine, collect biospecimens, and transmit curated data and processed biosamples to the PMI Coordinating and Biobanking Centers, on at least 10,000 people from diverse ethnic, social, and economic backgrounds who are patients in one of the 3 Illinois area HPOs (and their affiliates). Aim 2. Pilot projects: Conduct a series of recruitment pilot studies in the participating HPO settings, with detailed tracking of success rates, including percentage participation and diversity of participation, and from these studies discern the most effective recruitment strategies for each participating HPO. Aim 3. Milestones: Meet our stated milestones that demonstrate that we have succeeded in reaching short-term goals for organization, participation in national planning, and successful recruitment and logistics. Aim 4. Collaboration: Collaborate with other PMI sites in protocol development, Steering Committee (SC) and other committee engagement to plan for success of the overall PMI. For the UH3 Phase (Years 01-05), aims are similar to above with additional emphasis on accelerated recruitment and participant retention. We also plan to capitalize on opportunities to advance precision medicine science by participating in research studies as agreed upon by the PMI SC. In addition, we will plan to develop ancillary studies that engage the scientific communities of our 3 Chicago-area research institutions.