• Overview
    • Collaboration
    • Power Computing
  • Workspaces
    • Account Creation
    • Workspace Request
  • Data
    • Bring Your Own Data
    • Search
If you do not have a PMP account, please register.

The Institute's Precision Medicine Platform (PMP) is a cloud-based technology solution that enables the medical research community to accelerate biomedical breakthroughs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides the cloud computing capabilities and Hitachi Vantara provides the ongoing software development and managed services under the leadership of The Institute. The platform provides access to diverse datasets, power computing, and secure HIPPA compliant and FedRAMP certified workspace environments equipped with state of the art tools for data analysis while also facilitating collaboration capabilities for both internal and global teams.

  • Learn more about the Precision Medicine Platform here
  • Explore the capabilities of Precision Medicine Platform workspaces here

Terms of Use

Please refer to the Terms of Service when using a PMP workspace. Any inventions, intellectual property, or patents resulting from AHA funding (e.g. grants, data challenges) are governed by the AHA Patent, Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer Policy

The platform facilitates collaboration and reproducibility by enabling users to share workspaces and conduct analyses in a private, secure cloud environment. Users can also collaborate through traditional development methods such as github.

Collaboration is made easy with the PMP because all data and analyses reside in a secure workspace for which only the participant/team representative has access, unless the participant/team representative chooses to collaborate with colleagues and share the workspace on the PMP workspace portal.

Note: It is the participant's responsibility to ensure collaborators have the appropriate data access approvals when sharing.

There are multiple ways to take advantage of power compute in the Precision Medicine Platform, namely:

  • EMR, Automatic Scaling through Spark
    • Analyses that use spark based packages or software can leverage the EMR workspace auto-scaling cluster architecture to optimize performance
  • Elastic, High Performance Computing
    • Analyses that need to optimize software through traditional parallel computing methods can leverage the EC2, GPU and CPU architecture options

Default workspace architectures are designed to fit the needs of most users, however architecture sizes can be increased and customized as needed. To increase compute resources in a workspace or get assistance with power computing on the PMP, please contact us

A new user must Register prior to being given access to the PMP. Fill out the form to create a free, PMP account.
  • The password must have at least 12 characters, to include one upper-case, one lower-case, one number, and one special character.
  • Both the email address and password are case sensitive. Once the form is completed click on Register.
  • The system will send an email with a code to the email address used in the registration process for verification. Follow the instructions within the email to finalize the registration process.
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After successfully registering, click on the Sign In page and use your new login credentials to sign into the portal. Remember, the email address and password are case sensitive. Upon signing in the first time, you will be taken to the Search page to begin the process of requesting a workspace. Note: Should you leave the session idle for more than 20 minutes, it will time out.

A registered user can request a workspace, click the request a workspace button at the bottom of the search page. Datasets listed on the search page can be requested at any time, including prior to requesting a workspace. Simply check the box next to a dataset in the list at the bottom of the search page and click the Request a Workspace button to proceed. More information on the PMP datasets, as well as how to use the search page to identify datasets of interest is provided in the search section.Drawing

After clicking request a workspace, you will be asked to agree to the Terms of Service, to select the computational architecture needed (can be changed as needed later), and to indicate the amount of data you expect to bring on to the platform. Click Next and, if you are a single-payer, you'll need to complete the billing information. Click Submit. AHA Grant Applicants are to complete the grant application related fields as well as the billing information, however, applicants and grantees will not be charged usage fees as these are included in your AHA grant.

  • Once you have requested a workspace, you can request data to be added to your workspace through the same process by selecting your existing workspace in the menu dropdown at the top (not shown in image below).
  • Do not change the default cluster selection unless you are familiar with AWS sizing (this can be changed later)

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To request access to a dataset along with a workspace, check the box to the left of the dataset(s) and then click on Request a Workspace at the bottom of the Search page. After completing the fields shown above, you will be taken to the Research Details portion of the consent form. Approval is required prior to the release of a protected dataset.

Research Details
  • Research User Statement (RUS): a RUS is a brief description of the applicant's proposed use of the dataset(s). The RUS will be reviewed by all parties responsible for data covered by the Data Access Request.The RUS should be one or two paragraphs in length and include research objectives, the study design, and an analysis plan. Please include the phenotypic characteristics that will be tested for association with genetic variants. If you are requesting multiple datasets, please describe how you will use each of them.
  • Non-Technical Summary: Describe the RUS using layman's terms, suitable for understanding by the general public.
  • Type of Research: Provide additional comments as needed and indicate the type of research by choosing from:
    • Disease-related studies
    • Methods development and validation studies
    • Controls
    • Population structure or normal variations studies
  • Disease Area(s) of Focus: choose from the drop-down menu the disease area(s) your study focuses on.

Research Purpose: A list of Yes/No questions are presented. Respond by clicking in the appropriate box.

Attestation Statement: Review the statements in this section and check the box to the left of the "I attest to the following."

From there you are taken to the final page of the form, and if you are single-payer, you will be asked to provide your billing address as the last step of the process before you click on Submit.

Once you are registered, please note the following:
  • It can take up to 36 hours for a workspace to be provisioned
  • You will receive an email notification when the workspace is available for use
  • Check out the PMP User Guide when your workspace has been provisioned

Bring Your Own Data

Users may bring their own de-identified data sets to the PMP. Additionally, publicly available data can be accessed in a variety of ways on the PMP, including downloading data directly and pulling/cloning data from repositories. Information on how to transfer data to the platform is provided in the Get Data In and Out and the Access Data in the PMP sections of the PMP User Guide.

PMP Datasets and the Search Page

A variety of protected datasets and preprocessed, public datasets are available for request through the Search page. The PMP enables registered users to search across the datasets stored in the platform in order to determine the data needed to address a specific research question. The basic search capability is free of charge to all registered researchers.

The PMP Search page acts as a data marketplace and is designed to aid researchers in finding the datasets they need to conduct research, perform analyses or build analytic pipelines and tools. The layout consists of ring charts in the center, participant characteristic filters on the left, and the corresponding available datasets at the bottom of the page. The ring charts represent the total number of participants, by characteristic, that are searchable in the datasets listed at the bottom of the screen. The Notebook link next to each dataset can be used to understand the science behind the data, associated publications, information about the data contributor, how to access extra documentation, how each variable is harmonized, and the distribution and summary statistics of all the variables available in the dataset.

Protected vs. Public Data

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The lock icons in the Type column indicates if the dataset is protected or private; the data contributor of private datasets must approve access via a formal request process. The AHA serves as a trusted third party to ensure data security and privacy by facilitating the exchange between the data user and the data contributor. The process is streamlined through the Data Use Oversight System (DUOS) that allows users to request access to multiple private datasets at one time. DUOS is a semi-automated management service for compliant secondary use of human genomics data. The system ensures that researchers using genomics data honor these restrictions. DUOS interfaces with the various data access committees (DAC) to evaluate data access requests requiring manual review.

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