Informatics and Psychometrics

Contact:  Richard Gershon, PhD, Vice Chair-MSS,  Director of Informatics and Psychometrics
Email:     gershon@northwestern.edu

The Informatics and Psychometrics Group is a multi-disciplinary team with expertise in creating research software applications. We collaborate with research scientists to develop dynamic applications allowing teams to centralize research activities, develop research instruments, administer studies, and manage data.

For each project, we assess research study requirements, timelines, and study populations, to deliver effective, easy to use software for researchers and research participants.  Our software applications are most often used in web-based data collection but can also be used to collect data via standalone computers or IVR (integrative voice recognition). 

Other Informatics Groups at Northwestern

Northwestern University is a national leader in Informatics research, education and application.  Learn more about Informatics education and research at Northwestern>>

Our team has extensive experience with:

• Health-related quality of life, item banking, patient report outcomes, and computer adaptive testing 
• Development of data collection platforms to collect and store large amounts of data 
• Delivery of high-quality study data, following established standard operating procedures for data management and data quality assurance

Software Features
Features of software developed by MSS-Informatics are:

• Selecting existing Instruments for use in research projects
• Creating new Instruments from a pool of items for use in research projects
• Creating new Items
• Entering/Referencing Item or Instrument Statistics
• Tracking Item Histories
• Set-up of Computer-based data collection methods for research projects
• Uploading Consent Forms
• Generating Study-specific websites
• Registering research participants & administration of research studies

Data Security
Data security is an MSS Informatics priority.  We have developed an infrastructure for confidential data management that includes sophisticated use of firewall technologies, dedicated database servers, and related technological capabilities. We observe high standards of data security practices for all projects and clients. Our approach to security includes a collection of policies, procedures, and practices designed to maximize three characteristics for critical resources: confidentiality, integrity, and availability.