Enabling Clinical Data Reuse with openEHR Data Warehouse Environments

Modern medicine needs methods to enable access to data captured during health care for research, surveillance, decision support and other secondary uses. Initiatives like the National Patient Centered Clinical Research Network in the US and the Electronic Health Records for Clinical Research in the EU are facilitating the reuse of Electronic Health Record (EHR) data for clinical research. One of the barriers for data reuse is the integration and interoperability of different Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). The use of EHR standards like openEHR can alleviate these barriers providing a standard, unambiguous, semantically enriched representation of clinical data to enable semantic interoperability and data integration. Few works have been published describing how to drive proprietary data stored in EHRs into standard openEHR repositories. This tutorial provides an overview of the key concepts, tools and techniques necessary to implement an openEHR-based Data Warehouse (DW) environment to reuse clinical data. We aim to provide insights into data extraction from propietary sources, transformation into openEHR compliant instances to populate a standard repository and enable access to it using standard query languages and services.