EURECA

EURECA aimed to build an advanced, standards-based, and scalable semantic integration environment that enabled seamless, secure, and consistent bi-directional linking of clinical research and clinical care systems to:

• Support more effective and efficient execution of clinical research by:
  • Allowing faster eligible patient identification and enrolment in clinical trials
  • Providing access to large amounts of patient data
  • Enabling long-term follow-up of patients
  • Avoid the current need for multiple data entries in the various clinical care
• Allow data mining of longitudinal EHR data for early detection of patient safety issues related to therapies and drugs that would not become manifest in a clinical trial either due to limited sample size or to a limited trial duration
• Allow for faster transfer of new research findings and guidelines to the clinical setting (from bench-to-bedside)
• Enable healthcare professionals to extract in each patient’s case the relevant data out of the overwhelmingly large amounts of heterogeneous patient data and treatment information.
  

At the core of the project was achieving semantic interoperability among EHR and clinical trial systems, consistent with existing standards, while managing the various sources of heterogeneity: technology, medical vocabulary, language, etc.

This required the definition of sound information models describing the EHR and the clinical trial systems, and capturing the semantics of the clinical terms by standard terminology systems. The scalability of the solution was achieved by modularisation, identifying core data subsets covering the chosen clinical domains. The project demonstrated and validated concepts developed in EURECA by implementing a set of software services and tools that were deployed in the context of pilot demonstrators. EURECA developed solutions that fulfilled the data protection and security needs and the legal, ethical, and regulatory requirements related to linking research and EHR data.