Expressing Patient Selection Criteria Based on HL7 V3 Templates Within the Open-Source Tool ART-DECOR

Reuse of EHR data for selecting patients who are eligible for clinical research can substantially improve the recruitment process. ART-DECOR is an open-source tool that is commonly used to design and publish HL7 V3 templates of national (e.g. ELGA) and international EHR initiatives.

Extend ART-DECOR to allow the definition of criteria that may be used for patient selection.

Using the native ART-DECOR development framework we extended existing ART-DECOR template associations by allowing conditions to be formulated.

An editor for the specification of conditions was implemented. The resulting criteria are internally translated to XPath expressions and can be immediately applied to CDA documents. As a prototypical application of our approach we implemented a "Trial Criteria Evaluator" tool that allows trial eligibility criteria to be composed of our ART-DECOR criteria and have them checked against a patient's CDA documents.

Referring to HL7 templates, our criteria can be applied to documents of national EHR systems such as ELGA and hereby reach a broad patient cohort. Implementing our approach within ART-DECOR alleviates its reuse and enhancement by other researchers.