Collaborative project in Medical Informatics (CIMED). Subproject 2: An integration model for visual and
textual information of clinical trials and electronic health records.
A growing field of biomedical interest, scientific as well as clinical and pharmaceutical, is the design and planning of clinical trials in order to accelerate the process of incorporating new drugs and medical procedures to patient care. In general, these assays usually involve no extended in time follow-up, so there is a gap in the information available years after completion of the trial. This is even more remarkable when clinical trials focus on chronic diseases. In addition, patient recruitment is one of the most influential factors in planning a clinical trial, since the lack of patients for a study may cause a significant delay, or even lead it to failure.
In the subproject 2, we present research techniques to improve both the efficiency of the design process, planning and recruitment in clinical trials, and the availability and quality of related information. This subproject will focus on research and design of data integration models necessary to relate clinical trials’ information to electronic health records, providing a framework for improved monitoring –which links to the subproject 1 — that may be used to study specific populations. Since this data model will enrich the information available, and results of clinical trials and electronic health records can contain visual information, we will investigate a new direction for organizing this information by means of visual ontologies and taxonomies.