Clinerion announces that data integration to its Patient Recruitment System platform can now process electronic medical records made available by hospitals using the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. Hospitals using FHIR may now directly exchange data with Patient Recruitment System without the need for additional implementation effort.

Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a data exchange standard released by the Health Level Seven International (HL7) health-care standards organization for exchanging healthcare information electronically. FHIR is the latest connector technology which can be accommodated by Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System. Clinerion’s highly flexible data integration system can handle different data models and standards. This covers i2b2 and more than ten other models used in different hospital information systems worldwide. In addition to FHIR, data exchange with Patient Recruitment System is also possible with the standards HL7, OMOP and RIM (the last two also released by HL7).

Clinerion’s Patient Recruitment System processes electronic patient data at its network of partner hospitals for the provision of its services for clinical trial patient search and identification, data generation for real-world evidence and market access activities. The patient data are fully anonymized, but Clinerion’s “Anonymized Identification” technology allows authorized hospital staff to re-identify patients on-site for clinical trials.

Connection with Patient Recruitment System involves ETL (“exchange, transform, load”) push of anonymized patient data from the hospital’s internal hospital information system to a Patient Recruitment System server installed inside the hospital’s secure IT infrastructure. Patient data security is maintained because the ETL push is fully under the control of the hospital’s IT staff and all patient data stays within the local network of the hospitals.

“Patient Recruitment System has always been interoperable with every available electronic health records system currently used—it has been an essential part of our offering,” said Andreas Walter, Clinerion Chief Technology Officer. “The introduction of the FHIR standard to the Clinerion offering simply means we now have standardized processes in place to accommodate FHIR and can therefore react much more quickly than before. With this, we are not only adding additional data input possibilities for standard data models, but also the ability to connect to a large set of HIS systems.”