Clinical Data Repositories

• Clinical Data Repositories (CDR) are electronic or written databases that represent an aggregated database of clinical information.
• A clinical data repository usually houses a multitude of laboratory results, diagnostic reports, and various clinical documentations.
• The data in a clinical data repository are readily searchable and exportable, often because the information is gathered from standard clinical care procedures.
• A clinical data repository integrates physician-entered data with data from different existing information systems including laboratory, radiology, admission, and pharmacy among others.
• A clinical data repository is a location where both clinical data and other data of interest, such as external data sources and financial data, are assimilated.
• A clinical data repository can successfully depict the same sample across different points in time, from varying sources both within and outside the health institution.
• Common kinds of available information in a clinical data repository are Patient Demographics, Patient’s Primary Care Provider, Medication List, Allergies, Hospital Inpatient Visits, Emergency Department Encounters, Outpatient Practice Visits, Immunizations, Diagnoses, Procedures, Lab Results, Social History, Vital Signs.
• Study is a database that collects observations for a specific clinical research study.
• Electronic Health Record is a database of observations made as a result of direct health care.
• Registry is a collection of observations collected and organized for the purpose of studying or guiding particular outcomes on a defined population.
• Warehouse is a repository that adds levels of integration and quality to the primary (research or clinical) data of a single institution, to support flexible queries for multiple uses.
• Collection is a library of heterogeneous data sets from more organizations than a warehouse or more sources than a registry.
• Federation is a repository distributed across multiple locations, where each location retains control over access to its own data, and is responsible for making the data comparable with the data of other locations.
• Multiple Views for Patient Medical Record are typically scattered across multiple subsystems.
• A clinical data repository standardizes data from disparate sources into a cohesive format.
• A clinical data repository comprises numerous tables, each offering a partial view of patient information.
• The structure of clinical data repositories allows data to be extracted along dimensions such as time (by year, month, week, or day), location, or diagnosis among many others.
• Data collected through an electronic health record system may be retrieved at the request of an authorized user, whether a physician, medical technologist, nurse or radiologist.
• The electronic health record may present patient care information as text, tables, graphs, sounds, images, full-motion video, or signals on an electronic screen, phone, pager, or paper.
• Data visualization helps in simplifying a wide array of information, and it allows decision-makers to derive analytical results from information presented visually.
• Data visualization becomes useful in analyzing trends and patterns from large data sets.
• Data visualization is increasingly becoming an important tool in decision making.
• The graphical representation feature of most clinical data repositories enable scenario analysis, which helps users use different kinds of filters in order to change the level of information that may be seen.
• Common filters include age and gender, in order to assess how the outcomes of a certain intervention will be based on isolating certain factors.