RESTRUCTURING ROUTINELY COLLECTED PATIENT DATA - ORCA APPLIED TO ANDROLOGY

Hospital information systems do not always cover all required detail p er specialty, This may lead to scattering of data over disparate syste ms and the paper record, The ORCA (Open Record for CAre) CPR offers a generic structure for record sharing, and record keeping tailored to s pecific needs. We studied whether a semantic integration of existing a nd new data was possible, using the ORCA structure. Existing andrology data, originating from separate sources, were utilized for this purpo se, During normalization, Validation and explication steps, latent pro blems in the source data were exposed and removed, followed by a merge with new data items, By conversion of source data to ORCA, a unique r epresentation of medical concepts in the database was attained, facili tating retrieval of univocal data for multiple purposes. We conclude t hat the expansion to the andrology domain, including transparent integ ration of existing data, provides support for the generality of ORCA.