1. The architecture of a feasibility query portal for distributed COVID-19 fast healthcare interoperability resources (FHIR) patient data repositories: design and implementation study
- Author
-
Gründner, Julian, Deppenwiese, Noemi, Folz, Michael, Köhler, Thomas, Kroll, Björn, Prokosch, Hans-Ulrich, Rosenau, Lorenz, Rühle, Mathias, Scheidl, Marc-Anton, Schüttler, Christina (Dr. rer. biol. hum.), Sedlmayr, Brita, Twrdik, Alexander, Kiel, Alexander, Majeed, Raphael W., Gründner, Julian, Deppenwiese, Noemi, Folz, Michael, Köhler, Thomas, Kroll, Björn, Prokosch, Hans-Ulrich, Rosenau, Lorenz, Rühle, Mathias, Scheidl, Marc-Anton, Schüttler, Christina (Dr. rer. biol. hum.), Sedlmayr, Brita, Twrdik, Alexander, Kiel, Alexander, and Majeed, Raphael W.
- Abstract
Background: An essential step in any medical research project after identifying the research question is to determine if there are sufficient patients available for a study and where to find them. Pursuing digital feasibility queries on available patient data registries has proven to be an excellent way of reusing existing real-world data sources. To support multicentric research, these feasibility queries should be designed and implemented to run across multiple sites and securely access local data. Working across hospitals usually involves working with different data formats and vocabularies. Recently, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard was developed by Health Level Seven to address this concern and describe patient data in a standardized format. The Medical Informatics Initiative in Germany has committed to this standard and created data integration centers, which convert existing data into the FHIR format at each hospital. This partially solves the interoperability problem; however, a distributed feasibility query platform for the FHIR standard is still missing. Objective: This study described the design and implementation of the components involved in creating a cross-hospital feasibility query platform for researchers based on FHIR resources. This effort was part of a large COVID-19 data exchange platform and was designed to be scalable for a broad range of patient data. Methods: We analyzed and designed the abstract components necessary for a distributed feasibility query. This included a user interface for creating the query, backend with an ontology and terminology service, middleware for query distribution, and FHIR feasibility query execution service. Results: We implemented the components described in the Methods section. The resulting solution was distributed to 33 German university hospitals. The functionality of the comprehensive network infrastructure was demonstrated using a test data set based on the German Corona Consen
- Published
- 2022