June 24, 2015
An article published in e-Health – For Continuity of Care describes a framework to integrate heterogeneous clinical data into a central repository which has been noted as necessary for clinical research. The authors state that it is especially crucial for rare disease research as it is often necessary to “aggregate study data from several sites in order to achieve a statistically significant cohort size.” The authors describe a best practice framework that consists of three sequential steps which involves “(1) creating a harmonisation table, (2) setting up an ETL process and finally (3) putting the resulting data structure into a central repository that enables custom queries.” To decrease the work load and improve the understanding of the complexity behind data integration, they provide spreadsheets and ETL templates to support an individual implementation. Integrating heterogeneous clinical data into a central data repository is considered a necessary step for clinical research.