Los Angeles Data Resource (LADR)

Formally launched in May 2014, Los Angeles Data Resource (LADR) is a joint project of major Los Angeles healthcare provider organizations, including UCLA, Cedars, CDU, USC, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA) and the City of Hope, aimed at enabling clinical investigators to explore the size of potential research study cohorts across each participating institution. By integrating medical records and clinical research data, investigators in the greater Los Angeles area are able to find sets of aggregated patient information through a web-based application all while preserving patient privacy. Through LADR, investigators can obtain patient counts to determine study feasibility at participating sites and complete NIH targeted tables. 

The key feature of LADR is its use of "private record linkage" technology to identify data from the same patients across the participating organizations. By creating this linkage, LADR enables institutions to assemble more data on patient treatments and other exposures along with more data on their outcomes, to enable research that could not be conducted by any individual organization. Data on individual patients can only be obtained after further approvals from each institution that chooses to participate in the proposed study. LADR is a cohort discovery tool, meaning only patient counts can be retrieved. These are based on de-identified data extracted from each institution’s clinical data warehouse, transformed into a common data representation, and stored in a separate, dedicated data repository at each institution. LADR allows investigators to conduct interactive searches across the participating organizations based on patients’: (1) demographic characteristics (e.g. age, sex, race-ethnicity), (2) encounter diagnoses (ICD-9 & ICD-10), (3) laboratory test results, (4) medications prescribed, (5) procedures (CPT, ICD-9 & ICD-10), and (6) vital signs and vital status. Patient information and full datasets cannot be accessed through this tool, but it is possible to gather this information outside of LADR. As of 2018, investigators can now search a total of 7.2 million patient records. In addition, the LADR Consortium is launching a Care Coordination Collaborative, focused on working with care coordination stakeholders across its member organizations to identify and implement best practices for capturing and using data on the social determinants of health in the EHR.

For more information, please visit the LADR site.

Last updated
December 12, 2023