MeReSy

Objectives

The MedReSyst portfolio offers an innovative vision of personalized medicine through two main axes:

1. Network and systems medicine based on a holistic approach, considering the patient in their entirety
2. Medicine deployed via hospital networks functioning as learning coalitions

This approach relies heavily on health data and artificial intelligence to:

• Better understand pathogenic mechanisms
• Improve prevention and screening
• Develop more effective individualized treatments

Medical personalization integrates various clinical data (textual, numerical, synthetic, chronological) stored in Electronic Health Records (EHR). These repositories centralize patients’ clinical information, promoting continuity, efficiency, and quality of care.

EHRs constitute an exceptional resource for research, gathering retrospective and prospective data relevant for numerous projects. However, the collection and use of this clinical data face two major challenges:

• Technological challenge related to the heterogeneity of hospital information systems, especially EHRs, requiring a solution to ensure interoperability on technical, syntactic, and semantic levels of these electronic health records.
• Legal and ethical challenge related to the heterogeneity of rules governing legal access authorizations to health data applied by hospitals, which burdens access requests.

Results

CETIC is developing an innovative platform called FHIR Clinical Data Hub that aims to transform, store, and share FHIR resources containing clinical data. This platform has two main aspects:

• A local software component installed in hospitals that includes:
  • FHIR Clinical Connect: allows extraction and conversion of anonymized EHR data into FHIR resources, while generating descriptive metadata
  • FHIR Clinical Repository: locally stores FHIR resources and their associated metadata
  • FHIR Clinical Share: API enabling data sharing with researchers, subject to authorization from the hospital’s ethics committee
• A legal compliance assurance process that constitutes the second component of the project

This platform thus facilitates access to clinical data for research while respecting the ethical and legal constraints related to health data protection.

Added Value

The FHIR Data Hub platform will contribute to the effort of standardizing medical data in hospitals and strengthening the interoperability of hospital systems, which will help accelerate medical R&D by improving diagnosis and implementing new personalized and targeted treatments. This will contribute to stimulating innovation and the Walloon economy in the healthcare field.