BUDAPEST, HUNGARY - (HealthTech Wire / News) - Implementing healthcare IT solutions for clinical care is hard enough in itself. But there are those who are already thinking ahead and who envision a world in which medical research and clinical registries draw heavily on innovative IT solutions and electronic patient records.
- “Secondary use": patient data can considerably facilitate certain research endeavors
- The Ponte project draws on technologies to identify patients in electronic patient records with specific characteristics
- TRANSFoRm project: To integrate a responsibility concepts into digital research infrastructures is vital to win the trust of the patients for making data available for important research projects.
“Secondary use” is the term that experts have coined for projects in which patient data is extracted for research purposes. This is an extremely promising field of research, since mining electronic patient records can considerably facilitate certain research endeavors like, for example, keeping clinical registries up-to-date or identifying suitable patients for clinical trials.
There are many difficulties with these kinds of secondary use projects. Two such projects were discussed in a session of the European Ministerial Conference on eHealth. One big issue centers on how to develop the intelligence needed to automatically mine patient records in the search of, for example, suitable patients for clinical trials.
This is the objective of the Ponte project which Professor Michael Schroeder from TU Dresden talked about. The Ponte project is a follow-up project to a former EU-funded initiative in which data mining technologies were developed for improving non-expert research in biomedical databases like PubMed. At the heart of the technology is a huge amount of background knowledge that is systematically linked to the content of the database. “This helps to take expert knowledge and make it available to non-experts,” Schroeder said. The Ponte project draws on similar technologies, but the goal this time is not to identify relevant research information but to identify patients in electronic patient records with specific characteristics that are needed for a certain clinical trial.
Obviously privacy issues have to be taken into account when it comes to automatically identifying patients based on clinical records. Professor Christian Ohmann of Heinrich Heine-University Düsseldorf is dealing with this topic in a work package that is part of the EU-funded TRANSFoRm project. The TRANSFoRm project is about bringing together primary care data with other data sources to support clinical research and improve patient safety.
One basic principle of the privacy and confidentiality framework that Ohmann and his colleagues have developed is based on the treating physician always retaining prime responsibility for the patient data. He is the one who knows the patient, and he has to be the one to contact him in the first place in the event that researchers are interested in recruiting him for a study. To integrate these kinds of responsibility concept into digital research infrastructures is vital to gaining the trust of the patients for making data available for important research projects.
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Source: HealthTech wire
