Abstraction-based temporal data retrieval for a Clinical Data Repository

Disease and patient care processes often create characteristic states, trends, and temporal patterns in clinical events and observations, called temporal abstractions. Identifying patient populations who share similar abstractions may be useful for clinical research, outcomes studies, and quality assurance. In these settings, abstractions may be specific to a query, and thus allowing the specification of abstractions directly in the query would be desirable. We propose a query language for specifying and retrieving clinical data sets that allows specifying abstractions directly, and automatically selects data for retrieval based on the presence of abstractions inferred from the data. We describe the language and a prototype implementation, demonstrate its features with two queries constructed in response to clinical researcher-initiated data requests submitted to our institution's Clinical Data Repository, and report preliminary results from an evaluation of the implementation's performance.