Our Initiatives

HSSC’s partnership with MUSC and SCTR supports our mission to implement innovative and meaningful collaborative research initiatives across the state, which have the potential to improve health. 

HSSC works closely with SCTR, forming the synergy needed to extend the research infrastructure throughout the state. HSSC supports this program by engaging in statewide outreach, connecting partners across the state to the SCTR resources and programs.  Examples of this work include: identifying and applying for collaborative grant opportunities with partners across the state, educating health care leaders in South Carolina about exciting state-wide initiatives and resources, and enhancing the already robust Health Sciences Health Improvement, LLC Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) by adding more data types, increasing data quality, bringing in new data contributing institutions, and continuously fostering investigators use of this harmonized data to advance their research.   

Dr. Christine Turley, Chief Medical Officer at HSSC, serves on the Executive Committee and as a Child Health (CHAMP) Liaison for SCTR. She leads HSSC work on the combined efforts to foster multi-site collaborations and studies, pilot projects, CTSA Network projects, and the dissemination of electronic tools, training and best practices across the HSSC organizations.  Dr. Kathleen Brady, MUSC’s Vice President for Research, serves as SCTR’s Principal Investigator.

Through SCTR, multiple small grant awards to South Carolina researchers have been awarded to facilitate the use of CDW data. This funding has supported one research team in the development of a Smart Phone Asthma Monitoring System (SAMS) that seeks to help children hospitalized with severe asthma receive better follow-up care. This app is being tested in a feasibility trial.  The remaining grants are ongoing.