Case Study for Integration of an Oncology Clinical Site in a Semantic Interoperability Solution based on HL7 v3 and SNOMED-CT: Data Transformation Needs

This paper describes the data transformation pipeline defined to support the integration of a new clinical site in a standards-based semantic interoperability environment. The available datasets combined structured and free-text patient data in Dutch, collected in the context of radiation therapy in several cancer types. Our approach aims at both efficiency and data quality. We combine custom-developed scripts, standard tools and manual validation by clinical and knowledge experts. We identified key challenges emerging from the several sources of heterogeneity in our case study (systems, language, data structure, clinical domain) and implemented solutions that we will further generalize for the integration of new sites. We conclude that the required effort for data transformation is manageable which supports the feasibility of our semantic interoperability solution. The achieved semantic interoperability will be leveraged for the deployment and evaluation at the clinical site of applications enabling secondary use of care data for research. This work has been funded by the European Commission through the INTEGRATE (FP7-ICT-2009-6-270253) and EURECA (FP7-ICT-2011-288048) projects.