User-Centered Design of the C3-Cloud Platform for Elderly with Multiple Diseases - Functional Requirements and Application Testing.

The number of patients with multimorbidity has been steadily increasing in the modern aging societies. The European C3-Cloud project provides a multidisciplinary and patient-centered "Collaborative Care and Cure-system" for the management of elderly with multimorbidity, enabling continuous coordination of care activities between multidisciplinary care teams (MDTs), patients and informal caregivers (ICG). In this study various components of the infrastructure were tested to fulfill the functional requirements and the entire system was subjected to an early application testing involving different groups of end-users. MDTs from participating European regions were involved in requirement elicitation and test formulation, resulting in 57 questions, distributed via an internet platform to 48 test participants (22 MDTs, 26 patients) from three pilot sites. The results indicate a high level of satisfaction with all components. Early testing also provided feedback for technical improvement of the entire system, and the paper points out useful evaluation methods.

Building a Semantic Interoperability Framework for Care and Research in Fibromuscular Dysplasia.

UNLABELLED: Identifying patients with Fibromuscular Dysplasia (FMD) at the international level will have considerable value for understanding the epidemiology, clinical manifestations and susceptible genes in this arterial disease, but also for identifying eligible patients in clinical trials or cohorts. We present a two-step methodology to create a general semantic interoperability framework allowing access and comparison of distributed data over various nations, languages, formats and databases. METHODS: The first step is to develop a pivot multidimensional model based on a core dataset to harmonize existing heterogeneous data sources. The second step is to align the model to additional data, semantically related to FMD and collected currently in various registries. We present the results of the first step that has been fully completed with the validation and implementation of the model in a dedicated information system (SIR-FMD). We discuss the current achievements for step 2 and the extensibility of the methodology in the context of other rare diseases.

An ontological approach for the exploitation of clinical data.

Clinical data captured in hospital information systems may be unusable in their original format due to missing information or knowledge. The use of external resources (e.g. domain ontology) could be a way of dealing with this lack of knowledge. Our study thus aimed to develop a framework allowing a user to perform medical queries in the context of infectious diseases. By creating an interaction between a knowledge source and clinical data, using semantic and semantic web tools and methods, the users are able to perform queries on a database to obtain results about antibiotic resistance. This work has been performed in the context of the DebugIT European project that aims to control and monitor the antibioresistance growth via a semantic interoperability platform. The results obtained by the use of different semantic web tools were quantitatively evaluated by comparison of the number of results and the query execution time. We have compared our approach with classic business intelligence approaches in terms of usability and functionality.

Data Definition Ontology for clinical data integration and querying.

This paper describes an approach to build a Data Definition Ontology (DDO) in the context of full domain ontology integration with datasets in order to share and query clinical heterogeneous data repositories. We have adapted an existing semantic web tool (D2RQ) to implement a process that automatically generates the DDO from a database information model, thanks to reverse engineering and schema mapping approaches. This study has been performed in the context of the DebugIT European project (Detecting and Eliminating Bacteria UsinG Information Technology) that aims to control and monitor the bacterial growth via a semantic interoperability platform (IP). The evaluation of the process is based, first, on the accuracy of the produced DDO for different samples of database storage and second, by checking the congruency between the DDO and the D2RQ database mapping file.