Methods Inf Med 2012; 51(03): 210-220
DOI: 10.3414/ME10-01-0069
Original Articles
Schattauer GmbH

On Creating a Patient-centric Database from Multiple Hospital Information Systems

J. Bettencourt-Silva
1   School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
,
B. De La Iglesia
1   School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
,
S. Donell
2   Faculty of Health, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
,
V. Rayward-Smith
1   School of Computing Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

received:16 September 2010

accepted:16 May 2011

Publication Date:
20 January 2018 (online)

Summary

Background: The information present in Hospital Information Systems (HIS) is heterogeneous and is used primarily by health practitioners to support and improve patient care. Conducting clinical research, data analyses or knowledge discovery projects using electronic patient data in secondary care centres relies on accurate data collection, which is often an ad-hoc process poorly described in the literature.

Objectives: This paper aims at facilitating and expanding on the process of retrieving and collating patient-centric data from multiple HIS for the purpose of creating a research database. The development of a process roadmap for this purpose illustrates and exposes the constraints and drawbacks of undertaking such work in secondary care centres.

Methods: A data collection exercise was carried using a combined approach based on segments of well established data mining and knowledge discovery methodologies, previous work on clinical data integration and local expert consultation. A case study on prostate cancer was carried out at an English regional National Health Service (NHS) hospital.

Results: The process for data retrieval described in this paper allowed patient-centric data, pertaining to the case study on prostate cancer, to be successfully collected from multiple heterogeneous hospital sources, and collated in a format suitable for further clinical research.

Conclusions: The data collection exercise described in this paper exposes the lengthy and difficult journey of retrieving and collating patient-centric, multi-source data from a hospital, which is indeed a non-trivial task, and one which will greatly benefit from further attention from researchers and hospital IT management.

 
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