[SIMS REIN: a multi-source information system for end-stage renal disease]

In France, the prevalence of End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) is not precisely known. The sources of information are scattered and not coordinated. Consequently, care is ill adapted to meet the demand. The Multi-Source Information System is the basis of the Renal Epidemiology and Information Network (REIN). It is dedicated to improve and organise our medical and epidemiological knowledge of ESRD and to aid public health decision-making in this area. The proposed approach is based on the datawarehouses. This model allows a unified vision of scattered data into distinct databases, for a better management, be it particular (patient follow-up) or global (regional follow-up), with a finality of aid in decision-making. Several categories of problems were considered: the global conception of the information system, the organisation of the datawarehouse, which offers different viewpoints of the data, the integration of heterogeneous data coming from different sources, data exchange and definition of a specific ontology.