Summary
Objectives: Even though today most university hospitals have already implemented commercial hospital
information systems and started to build up comprehensive electronic medical records,
reuse of such data for data warehousing and research purposes is still very rare.
Given this situation, the focus of this paper is to present an overview on exemplary
projects, which have already tackled this challenge, reflect on current initiatives
within the United States of America and the European Union to establish IT infrastructures
for clinical and translational research, and draw attention to new challenges in this
area.
Methods: This paper does not intend to provide a fully comprehensive review on all the issues
of clinical routine data reuse. It is based, however, on a presentation of a large
variety of historical, but also most recent activities in data warehousing, data retrieval
and linking medical informatics with translational research.
Results: The article presents an overview of the various international approaches to this
issue and illustrates concepts and solutions which have been published, thus giving
an impression of activities pursued in this field of medical informatics. Further,
problems and open questions, which have also been named in the literature, are presented
and three challenges (to establish comprehensive clinical data warehouses, to establish
professional IT infrastructure applications supporting clinical trial data capture
and to integrate medical record systems and clinical trial databases) related to this
area of medical informatics are identified and presented.
Conclusions: Translational biomedical research with the aim “to integrate bedside and biology”
and to bridge the gap between clinical care and medical research today and in the
years to come, provides a large and interesting field for medical informatics researchers.
Especially the need for integrating clinical research projects with data repositories
built up during documentation of routine clinical care, today still leaves many open
questions and research challenges. Consideration of regulatory requirements, data
privacy issues, data standards as well as people/organizational issues are prerequisites
in order to vanquish existing obstacles.
Keywords Translational biomedical research - reuse of EMR data - data warehousing - IT infrastructure
for clinical research
