A Data-Centric Approach for Health Care and Research in a Health Knowledge Management Platform: Implementation and...

In the evolving landscape of health care, data use plays an ever-increasing role in health care IT. However, data are often siloed and uncoded free text distributed across several IT systems. This paper introduces a health knowledge management platform, designed to integrate, harmonize, and enable reuse of health care and medical research data. The platform aims to bridge the gap between research and patient care, showcased through real-world scenarios, emphasizing data harmonization and knowledge management within a health care institution. The study is based at the University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein.

The main objective of this project is to design, implement, and evaluate a knowledge management platform that integrates health care and biomedical research to support use cases in both domains.

The study describes the "health knowledge management platform" designed to access and gain knowledge from health care and medical research data. We performed several rounds of focus groups with stakeholders to elicit the platform requirements. In the process, we identified key aspects of the platform. From the functional requirements, we designed an architectural concept. The platform evaluation follows the Framework for Evaluation in Design Science Research and International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 25010 standard with a focus on key aspects identified and real-world scenarios. Two application scenarios, cardiology and radiology, are selected for a requirement-based, qualitative evaluation.

We show that our health knowledge management platform is capable of integrating diverse data formats like Health Level 7 Version 2 messages, CSV exports, and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. It currently integrates over 46 million admit, discharge, transfer messages, 38 million imaging studies, and structured clinical data for approximately 1.5 million patients. The platform supports different scenarios based on its 5-layer architecture, including a clinical data repository and services like Master Patient Index and Consent Management. The evaluation against 39 predefined functional requirements showed our platform's capability in certain real-world scenarios of cardiology and radiology. Our evaluation demonstrates that the platform covers the majority of the identified requirements to support knowledge management in health care institutions.

Our requirement-based evaluation of the health knowledge management platform at University Hospital Schleswig-Holstein reveals its capabilities, which is possibly leading to better knowledge transfer between patient care and research. The platform's architecture and standardized data improve the quality of data and facilitate access to knowledge. Ongoing development and potential quantitative measures will further enhance its applicability in dynamic health care landscapes.