In the near future, all public hospitals affiliated with the Brisbane Diamantina Health Partners (BDHP) will share access to the Queensland Health integrated Electronic Medical Record (ieMR). The Queensland Health ieMR, Australia’s largest, contains an extensive and rich repository of information that could be used to facilitate clinical practice improvement and clinical and health services research. However, it is extremely difficult and labour intensive to access this data in order to use it for these purposes.
This project aims to develop a new, efficient capability for data extraction from the ieMR. This involves compiling a universal data dictionary of all relevant fields in the ieMR back-end, developing of artificial intelligence techniques to extract semi- and unstructured data, mapping extracted data to established terminologies, and developing functionality to enable the data model to be searched using natural language querying.
The outputs of this project will support (a) health service evaluation, including practice and quality improvement, spanning individual departments to state-wide evaluations, and (b) research such as observational cohort studies, phenotyping for linkage studies and cohort identification and outcome ascertainment for interventional studies.
This is a multidisciplinary program involving informaticians, health services researchers, clinicians, data and computer scientists. The project is led by Associate Professor Clair Sullivan and funded by the BDHP under the Medical Research Future Fund Rapid Applied Research Translation Program.