DermaDashboard: Bridging the Gap Between FHIR Standards and Clinical Usability

Over the past decade, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) have become increasingly relevant in health care data standardization. However, the complex structure of FHIR makes cohort analytics with many-to-many relations extremely time-consuming, and, impossible in many cases. To support exploratory cohort building and data visualization in oncology, especially for nontechnical users, we developed the DermaDashboard, an interactive dashboard built on top of a relational FHIR-compliant PostgreSQL database. Relevant oncology data was preaggregated with a materialized view, and the subsequent visualization layer was implemented using an open-source visualization tool, enabling clinicians to filter and analyze data without requiring familiarity with FHIR or SQL. The database encompassed data from 3949 patients with melanoma and included 82,783 health records. Core FHIR resources were Patient, DiagnosticReport, and QuestionnaireResponse, with 54 mapped attributes spanning demographics, stagings, mutations, and treatments. The resulting dashboard allowed filtering across 29 variables to construct subcohorts and generate aggregation analyses. This implementation shows how open interoperability data standards, such as FHIR, can be used in the development of modular, user-friendly clinical dashboards for cohort analysis, and the architecture demonstrates a feasible path toward democratizing access to structured health care data.