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. 2015 Aug 13;10(1):174-7.
doi: 10.15265/IY-2015-010.

Clinical Research Informatics: Recent Advances and Future Directions

M Dugas  1
Affiliations

Clinical Research Informatics: Recent Advances and Future Directions

M Dugas. Yearb Med Inform. .

Abstract

Objectives: To summarize significant developments in Clinical Research Informatics (CRI) over the past two years and discuss future directions.

Methods: Survey of advances, open problems and opportunities in this field based on exploration of current literature.

Results: Recent advances are structured according to three use cases of clinical research: Protocol feasibility, patient identification/ recruitment and clinical trial execution.

Discussion: CRI is an evolving, dynamic field of research. Global collaboration, open metadata, content standards with semantics and computable eligibility criteria are key success factors for future developments in CRI.

Keywords: Clinical research informatics; clinical trial execution; open metadata; patient recruitment; protocol feasibility; semantic annotation.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Design of medical documentation is a large scale problem and requires global collaboration: Based on 300.000 concepts per data item and 40 items per form there are more possible CRFs than atoms in the universe. [picture source: Wikipedia, Andrew Z. Colvin]
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Currently most CRFs are business secrets, which is blocking efficient data exchange between information systems. Open metadata is a key step to foster interoperability.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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    1. Bache R, Taweel A, Miles S, Delaney BC. An Eligibility Criteria Query Language for Heterogeneous Data Warehouses. Methods Inf Med 2015;54(1):41-4. - PubMed

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