Summary
Background: The efficiency and acceptance of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) can increase
if they reuse medical data captured during health care delivery. High heterogeneity
of the existing legacy data formats has become the main barrier for the reuse of data.
Thus, we need to apply data modeling mechanisms that provide standardization, transformation,
accumulation and querying medical data to allow its reuse.
Objectives: In this paper, we focus on the interoperability issues of the hospital information
systems (HIS) and CDSS data integration.
Materials and Methods: Our study is based on the approach proposed by Marcos et al. where archetypes are
used as a standardized mechanism for the interaction of a CDSS with an electronic
health record (EHR). We build an integration tool to enable CDSSs collect data from
various institutions without a need for modifications in the implementation. The approach
implies development of a conceptual level as a set of archetypes representing concepts
required by a CDSS.
Results: Treatment case data from Regional Clinical Hospital in Tomsk, Russia was extracted,
transformed and loaded to the archetype database of a clinical decision support system.
Test records’ normalization has been performed by defining transformation and aggregation
rules between the EHR data and the archetypes. These mapping rules were used to automatically
generate openEHR compliant data. After the transformation, archetype data instances
were loaded into the CDSS archetype based data storage. The performance times showed
acceptable performance for the extraction stage with a mean of 17.428 s per year (3436
case records). The transformation times were also acceptable with 136.954 s per year
(0.039 s per one instance). The accuracy evaluation showed the correctness and applicability
of the method for the wide range of HISes. These operations were performed without
interrupting the HIS workflow to prevent the HISes from disturbing the service provision
to the users.
Conclusions: The project results have proven that archetype based technologies are mature enough
to be applied in routine operations that require extraction, transformation, loading
and querying medical data from heterogeneous EHR systems. Inference models in clinical
research and CDSS can benefit from this by defining queries to a valid data set with
known structure and constraints. The standard based nature of the archetype approach
allows an easy integration of CDSSs with existing EHR systems.
Keywords
Archetypes - semantic interoperability - electronic health record - openEHR - clinical
decision support systems