JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

To advance research with clinical data, it is essential to provide researchers with fast and easy access to the available data, which is especially challenging for data from different source systems within and across institutions. Over the years, many research repositories and data standards have been created. One of these is the FHIR standard, used by the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) to harmonize and standardize data across university hospitals in Germany. One of the first steps to make this data available is to allow researchers to create feasibility queries to determine the data availability for a specific study. Given the heterogeneity of different query languages to access different data across and even within standards such as FHIR (e.g., CQL and FHIR Search), creating an intermediate query syntax for feasibility queries reduces the complexity of query translation and improves interoperability across different research repositories and query languages.

Objective:

This study describes the creation and implementation of an intermediate query syntax for feasibility queries and how it integrates into the federated German health research portal (Forschungsdatenportal Gesundheit) and the German medical informatics initiative.

Methods:

We analyzed the requirements for feasibility queries, and the currently available feasibility tools that research repositories offer. Based on this analysis, we developed an intermediate query syntax that can be easily translated into different research repository-specific query languages.

Results:

The resulting Clinical Cohort Definition Language (CCDL) for feasibility queries combines inclusion criteria in a conjunctive normal form and exclusion criteria in a disjunctive normal form, allowing for additional filters like time or numerical restrictions. The inclusion and exclusion results are combined via an AND NOT expression to specify complex feasibility queries. We defined a JSON schema for the CCDL, generated an ontology, and demonstrated the use and translatability of the CCDL across multiple studies and real-world use cases.

Conclusions:

We developed and evaluated a structured query syntax for feasibility queries and demonstrated its use in a real-world example as part of a research platform across 39 German university hospitals.