Work

Information Technology

Year: 2016

Type: book-chapter

Abstract: Though related to clinical electronic medical records, health research information technology poses unique data management challenges. The repurposing of clinical care data for research must be performed with full awareness of its limitations. The clinical care data are often vast, and, unexpectedly, data transformations allowing application of high-performance indexing systems must often be implemented to enable cross-patient queries. The clinical care data are highly diverse, and a health-care atomic “fact” is often defined in the data to unify it for cross-patient queries. The codes used in the clinical data to describe patient-related concepts are often at different levels of granularity, and hierarchical schemes must be implemented to allow consistent queries to be performed. Once these problems are solved, the research data warehouse allows an elegant solution to the vexing problem of study participant recruitment. The creation of specialized data registries from the data can allow many complex types of epidemiological and bioinformatics problems to be addressed. Rounding out the application of large databases to clinical research are trial management systems, publicly available biomedical literature databases, and emerging approaches to data integration using new cloud and big data technologies.

Source: Clinical and Translational Science

DOI: 10.1016/b978-0-12-802101-9.00013-2

Authors: Shawn N. Murphy, Henry C. Chueh, Christopher D. Herrick

Institution: Massachusetts General Hospital

Language: English

Topic: Electronic Health Records Systems

Subfield: Health Information Management

Field: Health Professions

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,630