Clinical Data Integration Strategies for Multicenter Studies

Multicenter health studies are important to enrich the outcomes of medical research findings due to the number of subjects that they can engage. To simplify the execution of these studies, the data-sharing process should be effortless, for instance, using interoperable databases. However, achieving this interoperability is still an ongoing research topic. In the first stage of this work, we propose methodologies to optimize the harmonization pipelines of health databases, considering the OMOP CDM as the destination schema. In the following stage, aiming to enrich the information stored in OMOP CDM databases, we have investigated solutions to extract clinical concepts from unstructured narratives. In the final stage, we aimed to simplify the protocol execution of multicenter studies, by proposing novel solutions for facilitating the discovery of databases. The developed solutions are currently being used in European projects aiming to create federated networks of health databases across Europe.