3LGM2IHE (Supporting the Design of Interoperable Information Systems in Clinical Research)

Information systems for clinical research are very complex, due to many regulative or technical limiting conditions or due to the quantity of tasks, that have to be supported like management of probands, management of research data or management of biomedical materials. Furthermore, exchange of research data across different projects and integration of research and primary care are very important. Some of these requirements are relevant for similar types of research projects (clinical trials, medical indexes, cohort studies). Information architectures for research projects are often repeatedly designed and implemented for each new project. Reusability and interoperability of software modules beyond the current project are often neglected. Integrating the Healthcare Enterpris (IHE) is an international initiative, that collects requirements from Use Cases and develops technical frameworks which describe integration profiles to improve communication between different applications. Information system architectures can be designed on the basis of these IHE-Profiles, that consist of reusable and interoperable software modules.

Starting to use these profiles is very difficult for designers of information systems due to the quantity of integration profiles. The objective of the current research project – Supporting the Design of Interoperable Information Systems in Clinical Research (3LGM2IHE) – is to model all concepts from the IHE technical frameworks in 3LGM²-tool, which is a Enterprise Architecture Planning tool. Architecture patterns shall be disposed, which can be used to map typical functions of an research information system to IHE-profiles. These architecture patterns shall support the information manager of a research project to find appropriate IHE-Profiles and to construct a concrete research information system. The architecture patterns are evaluated with respect to their usability during planning of a research information system. They are offered to the users together with standard operating procedures by the 3LGM²-tool and the IHE Germany Cookbook. Dissemination of research results is guaranteed by the TMF-platform.

You can find details of this project on its homepage 3LGM2IHE.