About us

Organization: TEC is a research center housed within the section of Preventive Medicine and Epidemiology, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine. Our robust data infrastructure and methodological expertise provide a comprehensive research environment working with both academic researchers as well as our industry partners. Our faculty possess expertise in multiple research areas from methodological, statistical, translational, outcomes, clinical trials, cohort studies, registries, evidence synthesis and other quantitative sciences.

Belief System: Research @ TEC is open science, powered by Big Data obtained in partnership with institutions offering large de-identified medical claims and electronic medical records data. At TEC, we offer solutions to the three hurdles in Big Data research of finding the right data, accessing the correct variables and using the available data to assess real world outcomes thereby advancing discovery and innovation.

Big Data indicates extremely large, complex, structured and unstructured data sets that require specialized data processing and computing applications for data exploration, querying, visualization and analysis. The main hurdle for medical research is “to find, access and use” real world data to determine associations and causal relationships. Big Data allows narrower segmentation due to the voluminous nature of data and Big Data analytics leverages this high volume and variability, by advanced analytic techniques and reducing the signal-to-noise ratio, produces more precisely tailored results to advance discovery and spur innovation. At TEC, medical Big Data are derived from multiple sources such as electronic medical records, laboratory, pharmacy, administrative claims, inpatient records, outpatient records, social media, registries, surveys, clinical trials and cohorts.