A data model for integrating heterogeneous medical data in the Health-e-Child project

There has been much research activity in recent times about providing the data infrastructures needed for the provision of personalised healthcare. In particular the requirement of integrating multiple, potentially distributed, heterogeneous data sources in the medical domain for the use of clinicians has set challenging goals for the healthgrid community. The approach advocated in this paper surrounds the provision of an Integrated Data Model plus links to/from ontologies to homogenize biomedical (from genomic, through cellular, disease, patient and population-related) data in the context of the EC Framework 6 Health-e-Child project. Clinical requirements are identified, the design approach in constructing the model is detailed and the integrated model described in the context of examples taken from that project. Pointers are given to future work relating the model to medical ontologies and challenges to the use of fully integrated models and ontologies are identified.