Automated Import of Clinical Data from HL7 Messages into OpenClinica and tranSMART Using Mirth Connect

Electronic data capture (EDC) tools are designed to simplify data acquisition, improving data quality and managing clinical data electronically. Some data are collected from the laboratory information management system (LIMS), which is an important data source for a study. OpenClinica is an open source clinical data management system (CDMS) for web-based electronic data capture (EDC), which is used widely in academic clinical research. TranSMART is also an open source web-based platform used for the management and analysis of different data types common in clinical and translational research. Many LIMS use the Health Level 7 standard - Version 2.x (HL7) as a message exchange protocol. In this paper, we implement Mirth Connect as a Communication Server (CS) to convert these HL7 messages either to Operational Data Model (ODM) data for the automatic import in OpenClinica or tabular-delimited text format files, whose data is uploaded in tranSMART using the tMDataLoader tool.