Experiences with extracting structured patient data for use in clinical research

Area of Science:

• Clinical informatics
• Health data management

Background:

• Physician-recorded patient data is often unstructured free text, posing challenges for clinical research.
• Extracting and coding this data for research requires clear definitions and structured formats.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop an application supporting physicians in structured yet expressive patient data recording.
• To present modifications in data representation and storage to simplify research data extraction.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel application for structured patient data entry.
• Adapted data representation and storage for improved research extraction.
• Created a data extraction tool to facilitate clinical research.

Main Results:

• The application enables structured data recording by physicians.
• Modifications to data handling facilitate complex research data extraction.
• The developed tool successfully enables data extraction for clinical research.

Conclusions:

• The new approach balances expressive data entry for physicians with efficient extraction for researchers.
• This facilitates the use of routinely collected patient data in clinical research.