KM in healthcare: Distributed networks boost clinical research

A NEW APPROACH TO MULTISITE RESEARCH IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Established in 2004, Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) was the first statewide health data and research collaborative in the United States. Today, HSSC enables multi-institutional health research through its ?clinical data warehouse and associated governance and research tools. It has data on 4.5 million patients.

HSSC recently began taking a new approach to how its clinical data repository works. It has partnered with a company called Simpatico to deploy a clinical data repository called the Smile CDR that spans several facilities. The new federated approach is based on the emerging data protocol Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR).

Rather than having one central data warehouse, the idea is to set up a bunch of site-specific clinical data repositories. Each hospital in the network has its own repository that holds clinical data for that institution.

Each facility is able to have a dedicated repository of clinical data populated in real time by feeds from its electronic health record system. In the repository, hospital data is normalized into FHIR Patient, Encounter, Condition and Observation resources. The data infrastructure is then combined with an enterprise master patient index to provide standardized research data reporting and to enable the use of FHIR-based apps with a longitudinal view of data across institutions.