News
Elligo’s Rebecca Kush, Ph.D., Elected Chair of Vulcan Advisory Council
Connecting Clinical Research and Healthcare
Elligo Health Research®, the largest healthcare-enabling research organization, today announced Chief Scientific Officer Rebecca Kush, Ph.D., will bring her expertise in clinical research, standards, and interoperability to her role as recently elected Chair of the Vulcan Advisory Council. The Vulcan initiative was launched as part of the HL7 FHIR Accelerator Program to bring together stakeholders across the translational and clinical research community to streamline clinical research — leveraging standards to optimize the design, conduct, and reporting of clinical research studies.
Dr. Kush is Founder and President Emeritus of CDISC and served on the HL7 Board for four years. At Elligo, she and Elligo’s Chief Data Officer, Michael Ibara, Pharm.D., were awarded two FDA grants designed to use common data models and FHIR to leverage real-world data (RWD) for regulatory decisions. “Becky has devoted her career to improving clinical research through the introduction and adoption of clinical data standards,” Dr. Ibara said. “Her vision in bridging research and healthcare is a goal we all share at Elligo as we leverage HIPAA-compliant real-world data to bring clinical research as care to more patients.”
The Vulcan Advisory Council is comprised of over 20 expert stakeholders across academia, government, EHR vendors, physicians, regulatory agencies, and the pharmaceutical industry. It was initiated in 2020 by Rob Goodwin, MBA, Senior Vice President, Head of Clinical Development & Operations at Pfizer, and Amy Cramer, Global Product Development Strategic Partnerships at Pfizer.
“I believe that Project Vulcan has immense potential to realize a number of important opportunities that accessible and interoperable healthcare data can afford to everyone who is involved in or could benefit from clinical research,” said Dave Evans, President and CEO of CDISC and a Vulcan Steering Committee member. “We are fortunate to bring Becky’s experience and leadership to this initiative.”
About Elligo Health Research®
Elligo Health Research accelerates clinical trials through healthcare with access to over 150 million known patients and their HIPAA-compliant healthcare data, our IntElligo® Research Stack technology, and our PatientSelect identification and engagement model. Coupled with the largest Known Patient Access Network, Elligo’s Site Solutions enable healthcare practices and research sites to participate in clinical trials. By adaptive engagement of known patients and physicians, we accelerate the development of new pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device and diagnostic products.
About HL7 FHIR Accelerators
The HL7 FHIR ACCELERATOR program is designed to assist communities and collaborative groups across the global health care spectrum in the creation and adoption of high quality FHIR Implementation Guides or other standard artifacts to move toward the realization of global health data interoperability. For more information see www.hl7.org.
About Vulcan
Vulcan is an HL7 FHIR Accelerator that is focused on developing implementation guides (standards) for the exchange of data to support clinical and translational research use cases. For more information, please contact Vulcan at vulcan@hl7.org.