The Codebook functions as an ‘honest broker’ that provides mapping between internally meaningful identifiers like research subject codes and sensitive external identifiers like medical record numbers. Codebook version 1.0 was built as a pilot in OpenACS. It is currently being used in the Pediatric Hematology and Oncology department where their patient notes system is integrated to alert attending physicians when a patient being admitted to the hospital is participating on any of the department’s 200+ research protocols.

Codebook version 2.0 was conceived out of the pilot project and involved rebuilding the original Codebook in Java. This allowed the Codebook to fit into the CNEX architecture and facilitated management of the system. Additional effort was made to utilize the caCORE framework and the enterprise vocabulary services of the Cancer Bioinformatics Grid (caBIG) of NIH.

At present, Codebook 2.0 is being used in the InterSPORE Prostate Biomarker Study (IPBS), sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. Local instances of Codebook are used to collect data about study participants. The incorporated GRID service support to Codebook was incorporated allows the distributed instances of Codebook 2.0 to communicate to a central point of query, powered by PTracker. This functionality allows a central authority (i.e., the medical enterprise) to issue a query across all isolated instances of Codebook to determine whether a patient is part of any on-going research project. We are working on improving the Codebook’s ability to deliver lab and microbiology data.