Reusing Dormant Distributed Legacy Data for Evidence Based Medicine

In the current trend towards the evidence based medicine we should not forget previously collected data, neither in hand-written records nor in legacy systems. In this paper we present a process to integrate the data gathered by therapeutic machines of our industrial partner used for treatment of neurological and orthopedic disorders. These devices are deployed in numerous physical therapy clinics worldwide. During a therapy session they collect and store precise measurements of various physical parameters. As they have been used for many years, they hold a large and valuable set of data. One goal of the project was to develop a mechanism for transferring those dispersed data to a central server where they can be analyzed by a team of specialists in medical statistics. Another goal was to develop a software that permits to define flexibly various statistics by those specialists, without a necessity of having IT skills. In addition to the system permitting to collect and analyze the therapy session data, an application has been developed to implement a standardized quality of life questionnaire (EuroQol-5D) that allows to compare the results of the therapy using this machine with other therapy methods. As an incentive to cooperate in the program, the patient receives a personal report about his/her therapy progress, possibly benchmarked against the progress of other patients suffering from the same disease. This report also can be flexibly configured by a software developed in this project. In this way, valuable data, previously dormant on isolated systems worldwide, can be reused to validate and improve the therapy for the benefit of the patients.