Data Harmonization for Multiple Follow-up Studies of Community-Based Korean Genome Epidemiology and Cardiovascular...

As an initiative of the Korean National Institute of Health, data items with value sets from the community-based Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study cohorts, collected across a baseline and nine follow-up studies, were harmonized and standardized by mapping them to SNOMED CT to ensure data interoperability across the follow-up studies. In this study, data items were grouped as domains, and data items with value sets were compared across the ten follow-up studies. Data items with value sets were harmonized and standardized by mapping to SNOMED CT. As a result, the data items were grouped into 63 data domains, 20 data items with value sets were harmonized, and 2,491 data items with value sets were mapped to SNOMED CT. This paper presents the outcomes of the data harmonization efforts, including rules and examples of SNOMED CT mapping, as well as the challenges encountered during the harmonization and standardization process.