Resources and Environment

SABER's utilization of the scientific resources and environment provided by the University of Michigan contributes to the high probability of success for our clinical studies.

Offices and Physical Location

The SABER unit currently occupies 6 contiguous offices, and 3 nearby individual offices and 5 cubicles within an access-restricted area, with a total of approximately 1,874 square feet of space on the second floor of the SPH. The unit’s space has a SABER-dedicated copy center, storage room, conference room equipped with projection, teleconference and internet equipment, an additional conference room, and an open “collaboration” area with large conference monitor. SABER’s space also includes secured file cabinets with access granted only to authorized SABER staff for filing and data cleaning activities.

Access to the SPH building is open to the public during business hours but is locked after hours and access is provided to authorized individuals via a card access system. 

** In March 2020, SABER successfully migrated all staff to working remotely due to the COVID-19 crisis. As the infrastructure for remote work was already in place with all staff (for example, remote laptops, telecommunication access and procedures), this transition proved to be exceptionally smooth. Internal and external meetings take place as usual. Access to shared drives and files are connected normally. Hardware and software replacement and support take place remotely or by appointment with onsite support staff. SABER intends to continue to have all staff work remotely indefinitely, while offices are maintained to support those who choose to work on-site, those whose study functions require use of centralized systems, and for team-building and other specialized meetings.

Computing Environment

A large computational infrastructure supports SABER and the UM investigators. SABER uses IT resources at the UM School of Public Health and Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) at Michigan Medicine for general support, as well as website and shared storage services. SABER collaborates with the Michigan Institute for Clinical and Health Research (MICHR), a recipient of the Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA), for implementation of OpenClinica®, a secure, web-based, FDA 21 CFR Part 11-compliant clinical database and data entry software on many of our current studies.  However, that system is being sunsetted and we are transitioning to our new FDA 21 CFR Part 11-compliant system, REDCap Cloud®.

Clinical data is then converted into Oracle® databases. We use SAS and R as our primary statistical analysis tools. Internal documents are stored on an SPH LAN, and DropBox is used for internal and external file sharing.

Sites are hosted in a UM data center secured by two-factor authentication to maintain security and confidentiality of subject data as well as physical resources.

Other specialty software is readily available such as Stata, S-plus, Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, Fortran, C, Gauss.