Our paper on “Storing and Querying Longitudinal Data Sets in an Open Source EHR” was presented at the Information Technology & Communications in Health conference (ITCH) in Victoria, BC, Canada.
The cityEHR is an example of an open source EHR system which stores clinical data as collections of XML documents. The records gathered in routine clinical care are a rich source of longitudinal data for use in clinical studies. We describe how the standard language XQuery can be used to identify cohorts of patients, matching specified criteria. We discuss methods for ensuring good data quality and the issues in implementing XML queries on longitudinal data sets.
Read the full paper here.