Oldenburg, Introduction: A Clinical data warehouse CDW is a means for making routine data available for secondary use e. This work addresses the feasibility of a generic method for the conversion of relational data into a CIM based representation. Methods: In an agile process, we developed a generic method and simple supporting tools, followed by a pragmatic evaluation regarding manual efforts and performance in given technical environment.
We tested the approach using six different clinical contents. For brevity, we describe only results from evaluation with mechanical ventilation data. Results: The first step for converting the data is to build the content models e. Second step is to create a SQL-Statement extracting all relevant data from the relational database. Three different action types suffice create composition, create subtree, create entry.
Finally, the data is sent to the target database using REST calls. Based on the experience gained from mapping mechanical ventilation data from two patient data management systems, the most labor-intensive task was to gain a correct understanding of the contents of the data stored in an Entity—attribute—value model to create an accurate mapping.
This work also entails dependency of local experts knowing the source data. To stay reasonable, we mapped many attributes on generic data fields. Manual creation of the mapping included approximately attributes and 75 different actions to perform and took less than a day. Conversion of approximately million data rows circa 12 years of data took less than a day.
Discussion: We developed a generic method and supporting tools fulfilling the task with an acceptable performance. Findings from [1] and [2] support our finding of performance and technical resource requirements to be uncritical at least in a one-clinic setting.
