The REUSE project: EHR as single datasource for biomedical research

Integrating biomedical research and patient care is a challenging issue requiring interoperability solutions. During a clinical trial, clinical data are captured twice, first in the Electronic Health Record (EHR) and then in the Clinical trials Data Management System (CDMS). The aim of REUSE (Retrieving EHR Useful data for Secondary Exploitation) project is to provide a single source solution for electronic data capture to the investigators of a university hospitals involved in a multi-centric clinical trial. We first investigated the differences between the workflows of patient care and biomedical research to specify the use of EHR for clinical trials. Then we defined a semantic interoperability framework in order to enable the reuse of EHR clinical data and implemented a mediator that transforms CDISC Operational Data Model (ODM) XML into proprietary XML document templates of different EHR solutions and vice-versa. Implementing electronic data capture for biomedical research within EHR eliminates redundant data entry, thus improving data quality and processing speed. Moreover, unlike other initiatives such as IHE integration profile “Retrieve Form for Data Capture” (RFD), the REUSE approach ensures that all clinical data is kept in the EHR whatever the context of data capture is.