An approach for utilizing clinical statements in HL7 RIM to evaluate eligibility criteria

The HL7 RIM (Reference Information Model) is a commonly used standard for the exchange of clinical data and can be employed for integrating the patient care and clinical research domains. Yet it is not sufficiently well specified to ensure a canonical representation of structured clinical data when used for the automated evaluation of eligibility criteria from a clinical trial protocol. We present an approach to further constrain the RIM to create a common information model to hold clinical data. In order to demonstrate our approach, we identified 132 distinct data elements from 10 rich clinical trails. We then defined a taxonomy to (i) identify the types of data elements that would need to be stored and (ii) define the types of predicate that would be used to evaluate them. This informed the definition of a pattern used to represent the data, which was shown to be sufficient for storing and evaluating the clinical statements required by the trials.