A novel query rewriting mechanism for semantically interlinking clinical research with electronic health records

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) contain a rapidly increasing volume of data which is, in general, distributed in autonomous heterogeneous databases. An emerging trend is the secondary use of such data (in most cases anonymized for privacy reasons), for purposes other than healthcare, such as for generating accurate disorder epidemiology datasets, real world treatment progress assessment and patient selection for clinical trials among others. The structure and purpose of the EHRs pose significant limitations in the richness and the complexity of the questions to be posed. In fact, the latter case introduces a greater challenge; it requires that two different domains (in terms of semantics) need to be interlinked - clinical research and healthcare. This paper aims at presenting a novel SPARQL query rewriting mechanism as part of an ontology-based approach for interlinking clinical research with healthcare EHRs for supporting automatic selection of patients who satisfy the eligibility criteria of clinical trials.