Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Records through Semantic Technologies: The Cleveland Clinic Experience

1. 1 Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Records through Semantic Technologies: The Cleveland Clinic Experience Christopher Pierce, Ph.D. (Cleveland Clinic) David Booth, Ph.D. (Cleveland Clinic contractor) Chris Deaton (Cycorp) Chimezie Ogbuji (Cleveland Clinic) Semantic Technology Conference 25-June-2010 Latest version: http://dbooth.org/2010/stc-ehr/

2. 2 Outline Review of ~10 years of experience applying semantic technologies at Cleveland Clinic What is �meaningful use� and why care? Current state of electronic health data Cleveland Clinic semantic initiative and strategies Cleveland Clinic experiences implementing this initiative

3. 3 Motivation for Meaningful Use of Electronic Medical Data 2009 Federal stimulus package (ARRA) provided $19B to encourage adoption of electronic medical records (EMR) systems Medical practices that have EMRs and put them to �meaningful use� will get higher reimbursement from the government (Medicare and Medicaid)

4. 4 Meaningful Use according to ARRA and CMS (Medicare & Medicaid) Many initiatives with these objectives: Improve health care cost, effectiveness, and safety through use of electronic medical data Improve health data portability and accessibility Provide electronic reporting of health care quality and performance metrics Ensure adequate privacy and security for personal health information

5. 5 Current Electronic Health Data Data Sources: Enterprise EMRs Lab databases Billing/Claims databases Research data registries Reporting databases

6. 6 Enterprise EMRs A complete record of patient encounters including demographics, medical history, medications, tests, images, treatments, etc. Benefits Comprehensive scope for enterprise Accessible to human users across the enterprise Challenges Mostly narrative content Structured content often inaccessible for significant periods of time, and difficult to retrieve

7. 7 Lab Databases Patient data captured during specific medical tests and treatments including indications, methods, results, and complications. Benefits Mostly structured content amenable to use by computers Challenges Restricted scope to specific procedure Locally defined terms Limited accessibility

8. 8 Billing/Claims Databases Data collected to support billing for specific procedures and diagnoses for patients Benefits Use of national and international standard codes and terms Structured data with enterprise-wide scope Challenges Terms of limited or misleading clinical relevance Can be difficult to access

9. 9 Research Data Registries Patient data collected to support outcomes research in specific domains Benefits Structured data Consistent, longitudinal data vetted through use in studies Challenges Restricted scope Locally defined terms Data silos with limited accessibility

10. 10 Reporting Databases Patient data collected for specific reporting to regional and national quality monitoring groups Benefits Term definitions consistent across enterprises Structured data Challenges Restricted scope Definitions of the same terms vary among reporting databases

11. 11 Electronic Health Data Ecosystem

12. 12 How to Accomplish Meaningful Use? Infrastructure needed for meaningful use: Localized control of data collection Centralized control of data definitions Machine and human readable definitions of all data elements Structured data amenable to machine processing Semantic technology can be used to build this infrastructure

13. 13 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Initiative Goals: Make population-centric data available and useful to clinical investigators and administrators across the enterprise to: Improve reporting of health care quality metrics Facilitate clinical research (study data collection, cohort identification, analysis dataset creation, etc.)

14. 14 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Initiative HOW? Reduce barriers to population-centric use of electronic medical data by: Increasing data interoperability: data in one system accessible and useable by others Increasing data reusability: data useful for multiple and novel purposes Reducing data silos: data accessible from centralized source(s) through integration and federation Reducing data redundancy: data collected once and usable by all

15. 15 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Initiative Strategies: Build centralized/federated semantic data repository Define and collect stable core data elements and clinical facts Define RDF data models augmented by domain and upper ontologies Link RDF instance data with ontologies and rules to support inference, query, and derived views

16. 16 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Initiative TimeLine: 1997-2002 Small proof of concept studies 2003 Launched development project 2004 Created Patient Record ontology (>4000 classes & > 400 relations) 2007 Began Cycorp collaboration 2007 Converted 200K patient�s data to RDF (~120 million triples) 2008 Live production system released 2010 Move to commercial semantic platform

17. 17 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Strategies Build Centralized/federated semantic data repository Define and collect stable core data elements and clinical facts Define RDF data models augmented by domain and upper ontologies Link RDF instance data with ontologies and rules to support inference, query, and derived views

18. 18 Why a Semantic Data Repository? Rather than ETL-based Warehouse Easier data federation and integration than with ETL Removes syntactic barriers Provides robust framework for reconciling semantic discrepancies

19. 19 Experience: Semantic Data Repository

20. 20 Experience: Semantic Data Repository Strengths Data stored as both XML and RDF usable by services and applications that handle either format (e.g., forms-based processing of XML vs. inference-based processing of RDF) RDF allows for explicit semantics not restricted to implicit XML hierarchical or RDB relational semantics Data model extensibility Easy data integration and federation

21. 21 Experience: Semantic Data Repository Challenges Query performance Model change control and propagation for application-data alignment Incremental update of RDF from XML Generation of XML from RDF Exporting data to other formats

22. 22 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Strategies Build Centralized/federated semantic data repository Define and collect stable core data elements and clinical facts Define RDF data models augmented by domain and upper ontologies Link RDF instance data with ontologies and rules to support inference, query, and derived views

23. 23 Experience: Core Data Elements Why core data elements? Data relativity - view of data dependent on frame of reference Temporal perspective: what is a pre-procedural risk factor from one point in time may be a post-procedural complication from another Definitional perspective: definitions for the same term can vary among uses and over time (e.g., current smoker) Version perspective: model/data versions If GRDDL is used, new XML formats do not even need to be known to the service in advance. If GRDDL is used, new XML formats do not even need to be known to the service in advance.

24. 24 Experience: Core Data Elements How to define core data elements? Event model: Most medical data can be easily organized into temporally discrete events with associated properties Fuzzy time: Timing of medical events can be fuzzy for many reasons. Need to embrace this fuzziness Pragmatic definitions: must find balance between infinitely reusable atomistic detail and special purpose definitions with limited reusability

25. 25 Experience: Core Data Elements Strengths Multiple uses of the same data No need to collect and store the same data multiple times in different repositories for different purposes

26. 26 Experience: Core Data Elements Challenges Poor alignment with current practice Clinical practice is to document patient conditions anew with each encounter Clinical documentation is part of legal record and cannot be changed once codified in patient medical record Past patient history data usually collected by clinicians from the perspective of the current encounter and often lacks sufficient precision to convert to core data elements

27. 27 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Strategies Build Centralized/federated semantic data repository Define and collect stable core data elements and clinical facts Define RDF data models augmented by domain and upper ontologies Link RDF instance data with ontologies and rules to support inference, query, and derived views

28. 28 Experience: Data Models & Ontologies

29. 29 Experience: Data Models & Ontologies

30. 30 Experience: Data Models & Ontologies Strengths Provides a stable layer of terms through which to access instance data Supports different views of the same data Challenges Lack of strong upper-level ontologies in medicine Maintenance of internal and external ontology alignments in the face of model changes

31. 31 Cleveland Clinic Semantic Strategies Build Centralized/federated semantic data repository Define and collect stable core data elements and clinical facts Define RDF data models augmented by domain and upper ontologies Link RDF instance data with ontologies and rules to support inference, query, and derived views

32. 32 Experience: Inference, Query and Views Using inference to enhance queries and views Forward inference: Inference run before query time Either for persistence or on-the-fly use Backward inference: Inference run at query time Used to facilitate query formulation, data exporting, and report generation

33. 33 Experience: Inference, Query and Views

34. 34 Experience: Inference, Query and Views

35. 35 Experience: Inference, Query and Views Strengths Queries can be asked using terms not present in the instance data Caching and periodic refreshing of different views of the data (e.g., an STS view, a SNOMED view, etc.) Allows maintaining different versions of the same view

36. 36 Experience: Inference, Query and Views Challenges Inference performance bottlenecks: forward inference is slow and degrades significantly as the number of graphs and the number of events per graph increase Maintaining semantic alignment: different version of instance data, rules and ontologies must be kept in alignment as changes occur

37. 37 Questions?

38. 38 Experience: Data Models & Ontologies