All of Us Research Program
AAFP Partnership with NIH's All of Us Research Program
The AAFP National Research Network (NRN) is partnering with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) All of Us Research Program to inform the Academy’s broad family physician and primary care clinician audience about the initiative. There's powerful potential for using the All of Us Research Hub and accompanying data and tools to explore data relevant for primary care.
What is the All of Us Research Program?
The All of Us Research Program is a large research program. The goal is to help researchers understand more about why people get sick or stay healthy.
We hope that more than one million people will join the All of Us Research Program. People who join will give us information about their health, habits, what it’s like where they live, and if they will want information about their DNA. By looking for patterns in this information, researchers may learn more about what affects people’s health.
The All of Us Research Program will last for 10 years or more. This will allow researchers to study health over time. If you decide to join the All of Us Research Program, you will be contributing to an effort to improve the health of generations to come. You also may learn about your own health.
Replay All of Us Webinar
Learn how this program benefits your primary care research and how researchers have used the program. This event features Sheri Schully, Ph.D., deputy chief medical and scientific officer.
Why Join the All of Us Research Program?
The program is a historic effort to accelerate research that may improve health by gathering data from one million or more people living in the United States.
By taking into account individual differences in lifestyle, environment, and biology, researchers will have the information to better understand health and disease. The more we know about what makes people unique, the more customized health care can become.
Physician Researcher Testimonial
How I’m Using Research To Fight Health Disparities, And How You Can Too
T.M. Ayodele Adesanya, MD, PhD, is an Instructor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Family and Community Medicine. He is excited to focus on a unique junction of society, medicine, and science as a primary care physician-scientist.
Read Dr. Adesanya's full testimonial about his experience with All of Us Research Program.
Benefits for Researchers
All of Us data are curated into research datasets with tiered access, including Public, Registered, and Controlled Tiers. Researchers have opportunities to:
- Save time and resources and accelerate research by accessing:
- A rich health information resource, including biospecimens and increasingly robust electronic health records
- A longitudinal dataset that will follow participants as they move, age, develop relationships, get sick, and try treatments
- A diverse cohort of participants
- Raw data and data that are already cleaned and curated
- Robust computing and analytic tools to support complex data analyses in a secure data environment
- A group of engaged participants who may be interested in participating in ancillary studies
- Share workspaces and analyses with research partners and reviewers
- Learn from the program’s pilots and experiments
- Leverage innovations of other studies and cohorts
1 | Diversity
The program is enrolling a large group of people that reflects the diversity of the United States. This includes people who haven’t taken part in or have been left out of health research before. All of Us welcomes participants of all backgrounds and walks of life, from all regions of the country, whether they are healthy or sick.
3 | Access
All of Us aims to make it easy for a variety of researchers—from university professors to citizen scientists—to make discoveries using the program’s health information. Multiple systems and processes keep health information secure and participants’ personal information private.
2 | Innovation
All of Us is working to take research to a new level. The program is working with participants across the country, collecting many types of information over time, and building a health information resource that many researchers can use. This new model could shape how people do research in the future. All of Us will share lessons about what works well with other research programs around the world.
4 | Breadth & Engagement
All of Us is building one of the largest health information resources of its kind. As the amount of health information grows, patterns will emerge that wouldn’t be visible at a smaller scale. Participants are partners in All of Us. Participant input is welcome on every aspect of the program to make it better. Participants will have full access to information they share and information about all research projects that use All of Us health information resources.
Opportunities for Researchers
The All of Us Research Program enables traditional and nontraditional researchers to learn from a community of one million or more participants, including many who haven’t taken part in health research before. The program’s large, diverse, and broadly accessible health information resource can help answer many questions to help create a healthier future for all of us.
About the Research Hub
The All of Us Research Hub is your gateway to participant health information.
- Use the interactive Data Browser. The All of Us Research Program announced the beta release of the Data Browser in 2019 to provide a first look at the data that participants are sharing for health research.
- View Data Snapshots. Updated regularly, these snapshots provide visualizations of participant demographics, geographic distribution, and more.
- Read about All of Us health information sources and methods of curation.
- Find information about privacy and security processes that help keep participant health information safe.
About the Workbench Platform
The Research Hub also houses the Workbench platform and its suite of custom tools that support your research efforts.
The Workbench offers access to additional levels of data, workspaces, a cohort builder, and an interactive notebook environment. These tools are now available to registered and approved All of Us researchers.
All of Us Research Program Webinar Presenter: Sheri Schully, Ph.D.
Dr. Schully is the deputy chief medical and scientific officer of the All of Us Research Program. Prior to this role, she was a Team Lead and Senior Advisor for Disease Prevention in the Office of Disease Prevention (ODP). There, she led the effort to systematically monitor NIH investments in prevention research and assess the progress of that research.
Dr. Schully has authored or co-authored more than 70 papers, many focusing on the translation of genomic technologies into clinical and public health practice. She earned both a Ph.D. in biological sciences with a concentration in population genetics and a B.S. in zoology with a minor in chemistry from Louisiana State University.