Building a robust, scalable and standards-driven infrastructure for secondary use of EHR data: the SHARPn project

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Health Information Technology
• Data Standardization

Background:

• The Strategic Health IT Advanced Research Projects (SHARP) Program aims to increase health IT adoption.
• The SHARP Area 4 Consortium (SHARPn) focuses on enabling secondary use of electronic health record (EHR) data.
• Standardizing disparate health data is a key informatics challenge.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and demonstrate an open-source framework for EHR data liquidity.
• To enable the exchange, sharing, and reuse of clinical data for secondary purposes.
• To address challenges in standardizing EHR data for interoperable secondary use.

Main Methods:

• Developed a prototype SHARPn platform for end-to-end data flow.
• Ingested EHR data in various formats from Mayo Clinic and Intermountain Healthcare.
• Generated structured data from narrative text and normalized data using clinical models and terminologies.
• Utilized a phenotyping service to access normalized data.

Main Results:

• Successfully demonstrated end-to-end data flow with a prototype SHARPn platform.
• Showcased the normalization of both structured and narrative EHR data from two independent healthcare organizations.
• Processed thousands of patient electronic records, proving the platform's capability.

Conclusions:

• The SHARPn prototype successfully normalized EHR data for interoperable secondary use.
• Observed challenges in EHR data standardization for secondary use were identified.
• The developed framework supports the ubiquitous exchange, sharing, and reuse of clinical data.