On creating a patient-centric database from multiple Hospital Information Systems.

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Clinical Data Management
• Data Mining

Background:

• Hospital Information Systems (HIS) contain heterogeneous data vital for patient care.
• Accurate data collection from electronic patient data in secondary care is essential for clinical research but often ad-hoc and poorly documented.

Purpose of the Study:

• To facilitate and expand the process of retrieving and collating patient-centric data from multiple HIS for research databases.
• To develop a process roadmap, highlighting constraints and drawbacks in secondary care settings.

Main Methods:

• Employed a combined approach using data mining, knowledge discovery methodologies, and clinical data integration.
• Included local expert consultation and a case study on prostate cancer at an NHS hospital.

Main Results:

• Successfully collected patient-centric data from multiple heterogeneous hospital sources for a prostate cancer case study.
• Collated data into a format suitable for further clinical research.

Conclusions:

• Retrieving and collating multi-source, patient-centric hospital data is a lengthy and difficult process.
• This non-trivial task requires further attention from researchers and hospital IT management to improve data accessibility for research.