NCI and HL7 collaborate on clinical data messages

Language is infinite . . . , but data can't be. And, that's the problem. How many ways can a case report form in a clinical trial ask for an evaluation of a patient's tumor? Pathology, longest dimension, change since last evaluation, location, and on and on. How many ways can that data be represented? Free text, coded text, numerically, as an image, etc., etc. Consider multi-national clinical trials with investigators, patients, and sponsors using multiple languages. Next, automate case report form creation and data transmission. Where are you now? At the eDCI--electronic Data Collection Instrument. [Continue]

When completed, the eDCI project will join standard definitions of clinical trials data with a standard way to transmit those definitions and a standard way to package and transmit the data collected. The U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) is sponsoring the eDCI project within HL7 (Health Level 7). HL7 is an ANSI-accredited consortium of organizations and individuals active in the healthcare information world. HL7 members volunteer their resources for the development of standardized healthcare information formats, i.e, "messages." The eDCI project seeks to create messages in version 3 of the HL7 methodology. eDCI messages will define structured sets of questions for collecting data in clinical trials and they will also define messages for moving data collected with those questions. eDCI is conceived as a communications channel between computer applications. The applications themselves will format the eDCI messages into human-readable form to collect data and in database-readable form for the elicited data.