Bridging Data Models in Healthcare: Introducing a novel intermediate query format for feasibility queries. (Preprint)

To advance research with clinical data, it is essential to make access to the available data as fast and easy as possible for researchers, which is especially challenging for data from different source systems within and across institutions. Over the years, many research repositories and data standards have been created. One of these is the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard, used by the German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) to harmonize and standardize data across university hospitals in Germany. One of the first steps to make these data available is to allow researchers to create feasibility queries to determine the data availability for a specific research question. Given the heterogeneity of different query languages to access different data across and even within standards such as FHIR (eg, CQL and FHIR Search), creating an intermediate query syntax for feasibility queries reduces the complexity of query translation and improves interoperability across different research repositories and query languages.