An interoperable common storage system for shared dialysis clinical data

Abstract

Interoperability stands in the ability of different information systems to exchange data. Today interoperability is highly requested in several departments of healthcare organizations. Dialysis facilities register a high delay in the possibility of data exchange, because the strong lack of standards results in a huge gap in having interoperable systems. This work represents a first effort to overcome the problems of interoperability of data related to dialysis units. A Federated DataBase System (FDBS) approach has been adopted to construct a common data repository. The storage system has been built by the Dialysis Data Infrastructure (DDI), a unique multilevel standardized data structure supported by the Dialysis MATlib (DM), an embedded Matlab® library, that's able to convert, harmonize and query the raw data coming from the dialysis treatment units into a common interoperable format. The DDI and DM have been developed in the context of the Italy-Switzerland cooperation project INTERREG DialysIS, and currently contains 1018 dialysis sessions recorded referred to 145 patients.