Hospital software brings patient survival rate records from
around the world to your desktop
7 June 2005
Heather Ferguson
The Sydney Morning Herald (www.smh.com.au)
The Age (theage.com.au)
New software that interrogates patient health records - stripped of identifying personal information - in real-time is leading research into fresh treatments for lung and bowel cancers.
The Health Data Integration interface enables researchers to access survival rate databases at member hospitals over the internet. The data is compared with what they already have, eliminating the need to duplicate data sets and research.
The software was developed by the E-health Research Centre, a joint venture between the CSIRO and the Queensland Government. It will be installed in Queensland Health for a project examining lung cancer data from Queensland public hospitals. In the future, bowel cancer data from hospitals in Queensland, South Australia and Victoria will be reviewed as part of the planned national bowel cancer screening program.
The project's leader, Dr David Hansen, says it enables Queensland Health to paint an overall picture of lung cancer that in addition to survival rates includes the average age of diagnosis and at what stage the disease is discovered.
"It is hoped this will drive research into new treatment regimes for lung cancer patients," Dr Hansen says.
The operating system required varies according to the amount of data to be transferred, but typically hospitals in which HDI has been installed run Oracle on Unix or a large Windows NT server, he says. Queensland Health plans to use the software on its Windows server and IBM Unix workstation, also running Oracle. Clinicians within a hospital use the system to access external data, with most using a Windows machine and Microsoft Access.
Web services protocol is used to transfer data between the databases and the server.
The software uses its own XML schemas to match encrypted data, so there is no need for hospitals to build and agree upon taxonomies.
On installation, users specify the data in their database - such as patients' date of birth and ID number - and what data fields they will share.
The data is retained by the original custodian, ensuring data security and integrity and patient privacy, Dr Hansen says.
He says the system is expected to expedite research into emerging technologies by allowing control groups to be drawn from existing databases. "This will reduce the amount of time needed and the amount of data collected to do this research."