Phenoflow: A Microservice Architecture for Portable Workflow-based Phenotype Definitions

ABSTRACT

Phenotyping is an effective way to identify cohorts of patients with particular characteristics within a population. In order to enhance the portability of a phenotype definition across institutions, it is often defined abstractly, with implementers expected to realise the phenotype computationally before executing it against a dataset. However, un-clear definitions, with little information about how best to implement the definition in practice, hinder this process. To address this issue, we propose a new multi-layer, workflow-based model for defining phenotypes, and a novel authoring architecture, Phenoflow, that supports the development of these structured definitions and their realisation as computable phenotypes. To evaluate our model, we determine its impact on the portability of both code-based (COVID-19) and logic-based (diabetes) definitions, in the context of key datasets, including 26,406 patients at North-western University. Our approach is shown to ensure the portability of phenotype definitions and thus contributes to the transparency of resulting studies.