Analyzing clinical data in XML: bridging the gaps

As identified by recent US Dept. of Health and Human Services rulings [2], cohesive standards are essential to increasing accessibility and consumablity of data from heterogeneous sources. The ability to exchange standardized healthcare information is a critical aspect of this problem and HL7s XML-based Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is quickly becoming the prevailing format. CDA has clear benefits for healthcare information exchange, but also introduces new technical challenges when one desires to perform in-depth analysis on the information captured by a set of these documents. Healthcare Information Warehouse for Analytics and Sharing (HIWAS), a tooling technology, addresses this challenge in two key ways: one, summarizing data for better understanding by a human user and, two, facilitating conventional analysis by aiding in the creation of and transformation to a simplified model. By making these complex XML documents digestible with conventional business intelligence and analysis technology, HIWAS lowers a key barrier to meaningful use of aggregated clinical data. In this demonstration, we first describe challenges of integrating and analyzing CDA documents, how they are addressed by the HIWAS technology, and finally present an application scenario in which we prepare laboratory data captured in this standard format for analysis by public health officials.