Merging Ontology Navigation with Query Construction for Web-based Medicare Data Exploration

To enhance web-based exploration of Medicare data, we present a unique query interface merging ontology navigation with query construction, for cohort discovery based on demographics, disease classification codes, medication and other types of clinical data. Our interface seamlessly blends query construction with functions for hierarchical browsing and rendering of terms and associated codes from vocabulary systems and ontologies, such as International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). By unifying ontology navigation activities with query widget generation, a user can perform fine-tuned full boolean queries based on the substructure of the ontology, with flexibility to enable or disable subsumption-based queries. Query performance were evaluated on top disease subtypes of Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data, consisting of 5% of 2009 Limited Data Set files (inpatient and outpatient). Such interfaces will help moving the data access paradigm from a hypothesis-driven style to a data-driven one, while improving efficiency as a collective “secondary-use user community.”