25 Jul 2011

Mayo health centre eyes future trials recruitment with heath information exchange


Drug developers would love to be able to find qualified patients for their studies as easily as doing a Google search. While that might be a long way from becoming a reality, the Mayo Clinic has become one of the latest healthcare groups to embark on creating a new breed of electronic health data exchange that could someday be used to identify patients for clinical trials, InformationWeek reports.
Mayo is tackling one of the biggest bugaboos in sharing electronic patient data, a lack of interoperability among records systems. With plans to roll out its next-generation health information exchange (HIE) in southeast Minnesota, the health group is utilizing a range of technologies such as the government's CONNECT software and the same unstructured information management architecture as tech giant IBM's ($IBM) Watson supercomputer, according to the InformationWeek piece.
A key to Mayo's project is to normalize terms from different electronic medical records systems and build databases that can be used to gain insights into the health of patients whose data reside in disparate systems. This effort faces some similar challenges in terms of normalizing information from different records systems as the Partnership to Advance Clinical Electronic Research (PACeR), which is planning a pilot project in New York State that aims to aid in clinical research and in overcoming challenges of finding patients for clinical trials.

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