BioFortis and Catholic Health Initiatives' Center for Translational Research Announce Biorepository Information Technology Strategic Partnership to Drive Progress in Personalized Medicine

COLUMBIA, Md., Aug. 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Catholic Health Initiatives' (CHI) Institute for Research and Innovation's Center for Translational Research and BioFortis, Inc. have announced a joint strategic partnership to focus on CHI's vision in personalized healthcare initiatives for community hospitals across their system.

CHI's Center for Translational Research (CTR) is a clinical R&D and molecular diagnostics laboratory that supports the progressive advancement, commercialization, and integration of personalized medicine in CHI's community-based healthcare system. After an in-depth evaluation of existing software solutions on the market, CTR executives concluded that BioFortis' Labmatrix™ would best meet the innovative informatics needs in the areas of workflow-driven protocols, specimen biobanking, next generation diagnostics, biomarker discovery, and translational research.

With a network of more than 70 hospitals across the United States, CHI is the nation's third largest faith-based, non-profit hospital system. Leveraging this network, the CTR employs a high-quality biospecimen repository, CLIA-licensed laboratory services, and translational medicine research analysis in order to further personalized medicine. As one of the first major R&D labs serving a large community hospital network, the CTR is committed to giving healthcare professionals the latest perspectives on translational sciences for patients, who in turn shall benefit from both quality healthcare and personalized treatment plans. This combination serves as a role model for improved patient outcomes everywhere.

With the Labmatrix deployment in place, authorized physicians and scientists can easily explore and ask complex questions about collected data in a unified collaborative environment. This approach is expected to result in faster formulation and better utilization of healthcare intelligence stemming from complementary clinical and specimen-derived molecular assay data. Furthermore, Labmatrix's security framework ensures protection of highly-sensitive patient information, as well as maintaining regulatory compliance and accountability through a comprehensive audit trail infrastructure. Looking forward, BioFortis and CTR plan to create direct integrations with in-network hospitals' electronic medical records (EMR) systems, and further promote cutting-edge research advancements through secondary use of health data.

CTR National Director, Jeff Otto, PhD, MBA states, "Ensuring the continuity and security of the CTR's annotated biorepository is key to unlocking the knowledge within the samples we collect. Quality biosamples combined with Labmatrix's information technology infrastructure will allow the CTR and its partners to trust the answers that flow from our research, while protecting the privacy of our specimen donors."

About the Center for Translational Research (CTR)

Catholic Health Initiatives' CTR is an emerging participant and partner in the realization of personalized medicine. The CTR, CHI's only national laboratory, based on the campus of St. Joseph Medical Center, Towson, MD., is a venture of CHI (2009 revenue of $8.6B; 6th largest Healthcare provider in the US) who provides world class healthcare through its 72 hospitals in 18 states. The CTR will leverage its diagnostic CLIA testing, specimen procurement, biorepository, and custom development capabilities to enable improved treatment options for patients. The CTR will also act as an innovation catalyst for the CHI system focusing on personalized medicine in the healthcare setting.

About BioFortis, Inc.

BioFortis, Inc. provides software solutions for research needs of the post-genomic era within several key application areas including translational research, biobanking, biomarker discovery and clinical research. With the ability to centralize life sciences data sets in a tightly-linked, highly-annotated, and user-friendly manner, the Labmatrix application is utilized by customers as a critical component of best practices standard for research data management in the biopharmaceutical industry, academia and government research institutions.

SOURCE BioFortis, Inc.