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Background: Patients with rare diseases (RDs) are often diagnosed too late or not at all. Clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) could support the diagnosis in RDs. The MIRACUM (Medical Informatics in Research and Medicine) consortium, which is one of four funded consortia in the German Medical Informatics Initiative, will develop a CDSS for RDs based on distributed clinical data from ten university hospitals. This qualitative study aims to investigate (1) the relevant organizational conditions for the operation of a CDSS for RDs when diagnose patients (e.g. the diagnosis workflow), (2) which data is necessary for decision support, and (3) the appropriate user group for such a CDSS.
Methods: Interviews were carried out with RDs experts. Participants were recruited from staff physicians at the Rare Disease Centers (RDCs) at the MIRACUM locations, which offer diagnosis and treatment of RDs.
An interview guide was developed with a category-guided deductive approach. The interviews were recorded on an audio device and then transcribed into written form. We continued data collection until all interviews were completed. Afterwards, data analysis was performed using Mayring’s qualitative content analysis approach.
Results: A total of seven experts were included in the study. The results show that medical center guides and physicians from RDC B-centers (with a focus on different RDs) are involved in the diagnostic process. Furthermore, interdisciplinary case discussions between physicians are conducted.
The experts explained that RDs exist which cannot be fully differentiated, but rather described only by their overall symptoms or findings: diagnosis is dependent on the disease or disease group. At the end of the diagnostic process, most centers prepare a summary of the patient case. Furthermore, the experts considered both physicians and experts from the B-centers to be potential users of a CDSS. The experts also have different experiences with CDSS for RDs.
Conclusions: This qualitative study is a first step towards establishing the requirements for the development of a CDSS for RDs. Further research is necessary to create solutions by also including the experts on RDs.
Background: Clinical trial registries increase transparency in medical research by making information and results of planned, ongoing, and completed studies publicly available. However, the registration of clinical trials remains a time-consuming manual task complicated by the fact that the same studies often need to be registered in different registries with different data entry requirements and interfaces.
Objective: This study investigates how Health Level 7 (HL7) Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) may be used as a standardized format for exchanging and storing clinical trial records.
Methods: We designed and prototypically implemented an open-source central trial registry containing records from university hospitals, which are automatically exported and updated by local study management systems.
Results: We provided an architecture and implementation of a multisite clinical trials registry based on HL7 FHIR as a data storage and exchange format.
Conclusions: The results show that FHIR resources establish a harmonized view of study information from heterogeneous sources by enabling automated data exchange between trial centers and central study registries.
Background: An essential step in any medical research project after identifying the research question is to determine if there are sufficient patients available for a study and where to find them. Pursuing digital feasibility queries on available patient data registries has proven to be an excellent way of reusing existing real-world data sources. To support multicentric research, these feasibility queries should be designed and implemented to run across multiple sites and securely access local data. Working across hospitals usually involves working with different data formats and vocabularies. Recently, the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard was developed by Health Level Seven to address this concern and describe patient data in a standardized format. The Medical Informatics Initiative in Germany has committed to this standard and created data integration centers, which convert existing data into the FHIR format at each hospital. This partially solves the interoperability problem; however, a distributed feasibility query platform for the FHIR standard is still missing.
Objective: This study described the design and implementation of the components involved in creating a cross-hospital feasibility query platform for researchers based on FHIR resources. This effort was part of a large COVID-19 data exchange platform and was designed to be scalable for a broad range of patient data.
Methods: We analyzed and designed the abstract components necessary for a distributed feasibility query. This included a user interface for creating the query, backend with an ontology and terminology service, middleware for query distribution, and FHIR feasibility query execution service.
Results: We implemented the components described in the Methods section. The resulting solution was distributed to 33 German university hospitals. The functionality of the comprehensive network infrastructure was demonstrated using a test data set based on the German Corona Consensus Data Set. A performance test using specifically created synthetic data revealed the applicability of our solution to data sets containing millions of FHIR resources. The solution can be easily deployed across hospitals and supports feasibility queries, combining multiple inclusion and exclusion criteria using standard Health Level Seven query languages such as Clinical Quality Language and FHIR Search. Developing a platform based on multiple microservices allowed us to create an extendable platform and support multiple Health Level Seven query languages and middleware components to allow integration with future directions of the Medical Informatics Initiative.
Conclusions: We designed and implemented a feasibility platform for distributed feasibility queries, which works directly on FHIR-formatted data and distributed it across 33 university hospitals in Germany. We showed that developing a feasibility platform directly on the FHIR standard is feasible.
Background: Rare Diseases (RDs) are difficult to diagnose. Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) could support the diagnosis for RDs. The Medical Informatics in Research and Medicine (MIRACUM) consortium developed a CDSS for RDs based on distributed clinical data from eight German university hospitals. To support the diagnosis for difficult patient cases, the CDSS uses data from the different hospitals to perform a patient similarity analysis to obtain an indication of a diagnosis. To optimize our CDSS, we conducted a qualitative study to investigate usability and functionality of our designed CDSS. Methods: We performed a Thinking Aloud Test (TA-Test) with RDs experts working in Rare Diseases Centers (RDCs) at MIRACUM locations which are specialized in diagnosis and treatment of RDs. An instruction sheet with tasks was prepared that the participants should perform with the CDSS during the study. The TA-Test was recorded on audio and video, whereas the resulting transcripts were analysed with a qualitative content analysis, as a ruled-guided fixed procedure to analyse text-based data. Furthermore, a questionnaire was handed out at the end of the study including the System Usability Scale (SUS). Results: A total of eight experts from eight MIRACUM locations with an established RDC were included in the study. Results indicate that more detailed information about patients, such as descriptive attributes or findings, can help the system perform better. The system was rated positively in terms of functionality, such as functions that enable the user to obtain an overview of similar patients or medical history of a patient. However, there is a lack of transparency in the results of the CDSS patient similarity analysis. The study participants often stated that the system should present the user with an overview of exact symptoms, diagnosis, and other characteristics that define two patients as similar. In the usability section, the CDSS received a score of 73.21 points, which is ranked as good usability. Conclusions: This qualitative study investigated the usability and functionality of a CDSS of RDs. Despite positive feedback about functionality of system, the CDSS still requires some revisions and improvement in transparency of the patient similarity analysis.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused strains on health systems worldwide disrupting routine hospital services for all non-COVID patients. Within this retrospective study, we analyzed inpatient hospital admissions across 18 German university hospitals during the 2020 lockdown period compared to 2018. Patients admitted to hospital between January 1 and May 31, 2020 and the corresponding periods in 2018 and 2019 were included in this study. Data derived from electronic health records were collected and analyzed using the data integration center infrastructure implemented in the university hospitals that are part of the four consortia funded by the German Medical Informatics Initiative. Admissions were grouped and counted by ICD 10 chapters and specific reasons for treatment at each site. Pooled aggregated data were centrally analyzed with descriptive statistics to compare absolute and relative differences between time periods of different years. The results illustrate how care process adoptions depended on the COVID-19 epidemiological situation and the criticality of the disease. Overall inpatient hospital admissions decreased by 35% in weeks 1 to 4 and by 30.3% in weeks 5 to 8 after the lockdown announcement compared to 2018. Even hospital admissions for critical care conditions such as malignant cancer treatments were reduced. We also noted a high reduction of emergency admissions such as myocardial infarction (38.7%), whereas the reduction in stroke admissions was smaller (19.6%). In contrast, we observed a considerable reduction in admissions for non-critical clinical situations, such as hysterectomies for benign tumors (78.8%) and hip replacements due to arthrosis (82.4%). In summary, our study shows that the university hospital admission rates in Germany were substantially reduced following the national COVID-19 lockdown. These included critical care or emergency conditions in which deferral is expected to impair clinical outcomes. Future studies are needed to delineate how appropriate medical care of critically ill patients can be maintained during a pandemic.