Optimizing Clinical Data Enrichment for Intelligent Research

Enhancing the secondary use of data from routine care through external data enrichment methods can significantly boost its quality. This paper demonstrates a process-driven prototyping approach that separates sensitive and non-sensitive data, empowering medical experts to map medical concepts in free text to standardized terminology codes, all while granting data protection and information security. This approach is based on a prototype-oriented framework developed through discussions in a focus group. It consists of four integral components: (A) Clinical Data Repository, (B) Transition Database, (C) Mapping Tools and (D) Validation Tools. Data flows between the components contain medical concepts in free text and structured lists of suggested or validated standard codes. They are operated with the help of extract, transform and load processes as well as workflow management tools. By utilizing the components along the process, quality-assured medical concepts and their mapping can be provided for the secondary use of routine patient data for research.