LifeScale

LifeScale
A Unified Platform for Clinical Data Research
LifeScale is a cloud-based, secure analytics platform that integrates longitudinal clinical, social and behavioral data with elastic, high-performance compute resources to accelerate biomedical discovery. Developed through a partnership among The Ohio State University College of Medicine, the Clinical and Translational Science Institute, The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children’s Hospital. LifeScale aims to lower the procedural and technical barriers to biomedical discovery by streamlining researchers’ ability to engage with comprehensive patient data in a secure analytic compute environment. LifeScale addresses two key challenges in the analysis of clinical data: it streamlines access to a rich corpus of clinical data and it provides a secure unified high-performance computing environment for working with those data.
LifeScale supports discovery by providing access under the LifeScale Repository Protocol to a lifespan-linked data set with coded identifiers (“coded limited data set”) that connects disparate health domains (e.g., patient electronic health information, area-level social determinants of health, etc.) over time to form a 360-degree view of the patient. These data constitute LifeScale Core Data that include electronic medical record data from The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and Nationwide Children's Hospital and area-level social determinants of health from the Ohio Opportunity Index and Ohio Children’s Opportunity Index.
LifeScale provides access to these data in a cloud-based elastic compute environment, allowing research teams to perform data preparation and analysis with resources that scale to various needs. All analyses are conducted within the LifeScale Unified Platform, using its integrated tools via Databricks. Collaboration features are built into the platform.
Key features include:
- The ability to use structured clinical data across time.
- Integration of social, clinical, and behavioral data sources.
- A secure cloud workspace for collaboration.
- The capability to analyze large datasets using R, Python, SAS or Scala.
Contact and Citation
- For help or consultation, email the LifeScale Onboarding Team at lifescale@osumc.edu.
- Any scholarly products resulting from the use of LifeScale requires citation of The Ohio State University Clinical and Translational Science Institute NCATS CTSA UM1 Award.