Clinical research is hamstrung by slow, labor-intensive data collection, necessitated by disparate technologies (or lack of them) in the ICU. Saeed et al announce MIMIC II, a free, public access database that includes nearly all the relevant data from 25,328 ICU stays at Beth Israel 2001-2007 (including hourly vital signs, all labs, and some ECG waveforms). The quantum leap here is that the MIT, Oxford, and Phillips Healthcare collaborators got the computers to do nearly all the work: collection and aggregation of realtime data, calculation of APACHE and SOFA scores, etc., albeit with a lot of post-collection data processing and translation to fit all the information into the single database. MIMIC II, funded by the NIH, is open source and will be available free to all researchers. Crit Care Med 2011;39:952-960.