GIORG NUS-ORI Data Collection System
Participants: CHEN Ju, Limsoon WONG, Darren CHUA, Feng ZHU, Richie SOONG.
Background
The GIORG is a cross-hospitals study on gastro and intestinal cancer
lead by NUS. There are 6 hospitals involved in the project. They are:
National University Hospital (NUH),
Singapore General Hospital (SGH),
John Hopkins Hospital,
Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH),
National Cancer Centre (NCC), and Alexandra Hospital.
This project aims to manage all their patient information in a way
that cross-hospital/-department web-based secure queries can be
implemented easily.
Previously, the data were stored in document files,
and an NUS staff member has to go to the different hospitals to
collect their data and key them into some MS excel files for further analysis.
Many errors could be easily introduced in such a process.
More importantly, because different hospitals were using different schemes
to record patient information, it was almost impossible to retrieve
"joint" data cross-hospitals. These issues lead us to develop the
GIORG NUS-ORI Data Collection System here.
Challenges
- Many types of queries would be asked in the system. The users are
SQL-savvy. Hence suitable GUI must be developed. Most commonly asked
queries must be analyzed and optimized before hand.
- Different hospitals use different schemas to record patient information.
This is not only reflected in attribute name, document type, etc.,
but also in the format of data values. For instance, there are many cases
where the height attribute has character comment as its value. Such
a string type value would make comparison queries impossible.
- Attributes and issues considered in the GIORG study are likely to
change over time. Some new attributes may be introduced;
while some old attributes may become unnecessary.
A "database evolution" function to do support such modifications
should be implemented in the system.
- The hospitals store all their data for the GIORG study
in either MS Access or Excel. Because of lack of standardization,
almost every dataset has its own ways of recording. The system has to
provide for bulk uploading of such heterogeneous data.
- The hospitals want to directly access some part of the data
under one patient, like his histopathology records. Because the database
is hierarchical, the change to histopathology records may cause the
foreign key violation (when they want to delete).
Publications
- Ju Chen.
GIORG Online Query Platform Report,
project report, 11 May 2007.
PDF
Prototypes
Acknowledgements
This project is supported in part by the I2R-SOC
Joint Lab on Knowledge Discovery from Clinical Data (7/03 - 6/07) (Wong, Chen).
Last updated: 31/8/07, Limsoon Wong.