JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Objective:

Our goal was to devise a new methodology to extract, transform and load existing health datasets into HL7 FHIR repositories in line with the FAIR principles, develop a Data Curation Tool to implement the methodology, and evaluate it on health datasets of two different, but complementary institutions. We aimed to increase the level of FAIRness on existing health datasets through standardization and facilitate health data sharing by eliminating the associated technical barriers. Materials and

Methods:

Our approach automatically processes the capabilities of a given FHIR endpoint and directs the user while configuring syntactic and semantic mappings with respect to the rules enforced by FHIR profile definitions. Code system mappings can be configured for terminology translations through automatic utilization of FHIR resources. The validity of the created FHIR resources can be automatically checked and the software does not allow invalid resources to be persisted. We performed a data-centric evaluation of our methodology on health datasets of two different but complementary institutions.

Results:

Our approach can syntactically and semantically transform existing health datasets into HL7 FHIR without loss of data utility according to our privacy-concerned criteria. According to the data maturity indicators and evaluation methods of the FAIR Data Maturity Model, we achieved the maximum level (Level 5) for being Findable, Accessible and Interoperable, and Level 3 for being Reusable. Discussion: Our solution provides FAIRness on-the-fly which differs from a few highly specific existing works. We support the institutional migration to HL7 FHIR which not only leads to FAIR data sharing but also eases the integration with different research networks. Conclusion: We developed and extensively evaluated our data transformation approach and its software to unlock the value of existing health data residing in disparate data silos, to make them available for sharing in line with the FAIR principles.