A proposed star schema and extraction process to enhance the collection of contextual & semantic information for clinical research data warehouses

In the past decade, clinical patient data has played a pivotal role in clinical and translational research in support of new treatment options, medical interventions, drug development, etc. In support of this process, researchers require massive integrated data sets generated via a health information exchange (HIE) to centralize and automate the development and maintenance of a clinical research data warehouse (CRDW). The data harvested from the CRDW is obtained by cleansing transactional clinical databases (TCD) used for daily clinical activities. Traditionally, TCD schema and CRDW data models only capture conceptual patient data, often neglecting to address the contextual and semantic information attached to such data that is crucial for clinical analysis. In this paper, we propose a star schema and associated extraction process to enhance the collection of contextual and semantic information in support of CRDW that leverages HL7 Clinical Document Architecture in conjunction with the Reference Information Model.