What's Happening

To better support researchers and institutions using the ENACT Network, we introduced our Monthly Informatics Office Hours series. These sessions, held on the second Monday of each month from 3 – 4 pm ET, provide an opportunity to discuss technical challenges, share best practices, and engage directly with our informatics experts. We look forward to continuing these conversations and helping our community make the most of ENACT’s resources.

ENACT was excited to participate in the 2025 American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA) Conference, where we showcased our latest innovations in data harmonization and real-world evidence generation. Our team presented on key topics, including scalable approaches to integrating EHR data across institutions and strategies for ensuring reproducibility in multi-site research. If you attended AMIA, we hope you connected with us—we enjoyed discussing how ENACT could support your research!

The ENACT Network made a strong impact at the 2024 Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) Program Meeting, where Dr. Steve Reis presented insights on leveraging multi-institutional electronic health record (EHR) data to advance clinical research. Our presentation highlighted real-world use cases demonstrating how ENACT’s federated data network accelerated discovery while maintaining patient privacy. Attendees engaged in discussions about optimizing data-sharing strategies and fostering cross-institutional collaboration. Thank you to everyone who joined us—we looked forward to continuing the conversation!

Mora N, Mehall M, Morlino R, Hopton T, Morrato E, Pincus H.

Lessons learned from sustaining and transitioning a national EHR data network: The ENACT experience applying D&I science frameworks. AcademyHealth 18th Annual Dissemination and Implementation Conference; December 16, 2025; National Harbor, MD. Poster presentation.

Mora N, Mehall M, Morrato E.

Sustaining electronic health record research networks in academic medical research centers: Insights from implementation science. 2025 Fall CTSA Program Annual Meeting; October 23, 2025. Poster presentation.

Wang Y, Hilsman J, Li C, Morris M, Heider PM, Fu S, Kwak MJ, Wen A, Applegate JR, Wang L.

Development and Validation of Natural Language Processing Algorithms in the National ENACT Network. Journal of Clinical and Translational Science. 2025:29-Jan.

This presentation discusses how healthcare system processes, like clinic schedules and billing practices, lead to apparent “data quality” issues when using EHRs for research. Several approaches, including machine learning-based “computed phenotypes,” are described. These algorithms, integrated into the i2b2 software platform, are used at several ENACT network sites.

Griffin M Weber, an Associate Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Harvard Medical School (HMS), leads the Biomedical Research Informatics Core at BIDMC and the Informatics Faculty Lead for Harvard’s Clinical and Translational Science Award Program. He was the former Chief Technology Officer of HMS. His research focuses on developing computational methods and software for analyzing biomedical data, particularly in EHR data, medical claims data, federated clinical data networks, and scientific literature. He helped develop the open-source i2b2 platform for clinical data query and analysis and the SHRINE software for connecting i2b2 systems across institutions in the ENACT network. Dr. Weber received his M.D. and Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 2007 and was elected a Fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics (FACMI) in 2020 for his contributions to medical informatics.

The ENACT NLP Working Group, established with 13 sites, developed and validated NLP algorithms for rare disease phenotyping, social determinants of health, opioid use disorder, sleep phenotyping, and delirium phenotyping. The group achieved 100% site retention, deployed NLP infrastructure, and extended the ENACT ontology to standardize NLP-derived data. This work demonstrates the feasibility of deploying NLP infrastructure across large, federated networks. Speaker Bio: Dr. Yanshan Wang, Director of the Clinical Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence Innovation Laboratory, will present an overview of the ENACT NLP Working Group. The group is developing methods to extract clinical concepts from narrative notes for deployment in the ENACT network.

The first knowledge revolution took place in the 15th Century with the invention of the moveable type printing press, which enabled mass access to knowledge. In many ways, efforts to improve health are still based on 15th Century mass access approaches. It is time to achieve a second knowledge revolution--which will enable much more powerful mass action approaches made possible through AI and Learning Health Systems--to improve human health at unprecedented scale.