A methodology for multi-source Record Linkage.

As patient's medical data is disseminated in different health structures, building a data-warehousing system at a regional level, for healthcare co-operation, has some specific requirements compared to intra healthcare structure data-warehousing projects. In particular, there is no common patient electronic record's identifier among all the sources. Hence, data integration and Record Linkage is the most important issue in such projects. In this paper, we present Background on Information integration with the two main approaches of the problem: Schema Integration approach and Entity reconciliation approach. We show the limits of each of the two approaches and propose an approach based on theory of a set partitioning and instance identification.

A virtual intranet and data-warehousing for healthcare co-operation.

As patient's medical data is disseminated in different health structures, developing a medical or epidemiological patient-oriented data warehouse has some specific requirements compared to intra healthcare structure data-warehousing projects. The difference is that the healthcare structures implicated in a patient-oriented data warehouse project require some considerations about the confidentiality of the patient data and of the activities of healthcare structures. Building a data-warehousing system at a regional level, for example in cancerology, requires the participation of all concerned health structures, as well as different health professionals. The heterogeneity of sources medical data of has to be taken into account for choosing between several organizational configurations of the data warehousing system. In top of data warehousing, we propose a concept of Virtual Intranet, which provides a solution to the problem of medical information security arising from heterogeneous sources.

An approach for integrating heterogeneous information sources in a medical data warehouse.

In recent years, medical professionals are witnessing an explosive growth in data collected by various organizations and institutions. At the same time, the ongoing developments of networking technologies provide doctor with the capability to access these data across the boundaries of interconnected computers. In this paper we present a medical data warehousing methodology that aims to use data semantics to regroup and merge patients' medical data from different health information systems, which may be autonomous and heterogeneous. The proposed solution takes into account European laws concerning the security and anonymity of personal data.

Application of the medical data warehousing architecture EPIDWARE to epidemiological follow-up: data extraction and transformation.

In this paper, we present an application of EPIDWARE, medical data warehousing architecture, to our epidemiological follow-up project. The aim of this project is to extract and regroup information from various information systems for epidemiological studies. We give a description of the requirements of the epidemiological follow-up project such as anonymity of medical data information and data file linkage procedure. We introduce the concept of Data Warehousing Architecture. The particularities of data extraction and transformation are presented and discussed.