gms | German Medical Science

67. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e. V. (GMDS), 13. Jahreskongress der Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e. V. (TMF)

21.08. - 25.08.2022, online

Towards an interoperable Ecosystem within the Network University Medicine – adopting the Compass App to the central CODEX platform

Meeting Abstract

  • Yufei Zhu - Institute of Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
  • Florian Kächer - Health Data Science Unit, University Hospital Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
  • Martin Wiesenfeldt - Institute of Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany
  • Dagmar Krefting - Institute of Medical Informatics, University Medical Center Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie. 67. Jahrestagung der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Medizinische Informatik, Biometrie und Epidemiologie e. V. (GMDS), 13. Jahreskongress der Technologie- und Methodenplattform für die vernetzte medizinische Forschung e.V. (TMF). sine loco [digital], 21.-25.08.2022. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2022. DocAbstr. 186

doi: 10.3205/22gmds121, urn:nbn:de:0183-22gmds1211

Veröffentlicht: 19. August 2022

© 2022 Zhu et al.
Dieser Artikel ist ein Open-Access-Artikel und steht unter den Lizenzbedingungen der Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (Namensnennung). Lizenz-Angaben siehe http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Gliederung

Text

Introduction: Within the Network University Medicine (NUM), different projects have been carried out to support the understanding and handling of the COVID-19 pandemic [1]. The CODEX project has developed a platform to collect and provide clinical routine data of COVID-19 patients in the GECCO format, but also to provide a platform for app-based study data [2], [3]. On the other hand, the Compass project has focused on an open source framework for research compatible pandemic apps [4]. In this work we adopted the Compass app to connect directly to the central CODEX platform.

State of the art: Both the CODEX platform https://github.com/num-codex and the Compass app https://github.com/NUMde/compass are open source, as is the COVID-19 patient assessment questionnaire (CPAQ) [5] published early in the pandemic and has been used in different apps. The Compass app frontend is implemented as a React Native [6] client, to be available on iOS and Android, and employs the FHIR questionnaire resource. In the beginning it used the CPAQ, but has evolved to implement arbitrary questionnaires and to allow data items later be mapped to the GECCO data set. The central CODEX platform is based on the openEHR repository EHRbase, with it’s FHIR bridge allowing the conversion from FHIR to openEHR, including the CPAQ. It employs an OAuth2.0 authentication method.

Concept: The app is envisioned to directly communicate with the CODEX platform and it’s security mechanisms. Therefore it must be adopted to communicate with the CODEX platform rather than with the Compass backend.

Implementation: The app is technically written in Javascript. Because of the incompatibility between the CPAQ and the current Compass app’s version, adjustments were necessary, for instance the rules for the ID-system of the survey questions and the pre-defined code systems used in answer options. The users’ answers will be kept in the app until finishing the survey. Then a JSON string based on the FHIR Profile is generated. Furthermore, the app has been adopted to securely connect to the central platform with first to fetch the Access Token by OAuth2.0 and then send the formatted data with it. The code is published in a Gitlab repository [7]. The CODEX-enabled app is installed and tested on a Google Pixel 5. It shows only the CPAQ as default. With valid credentials the data transfer to CODEX has been successfully established.

Lessons learned: While we reached to upload data from the app to the CODEX platform, substantial modifications were required, due to the fact that the interfaces of the app and the CODEX platform lost interoperability with the further advancement towards a more generic framework, with the apps’ control logic in the backend. Therefore, the successor project NUM CODEX+ plans to couple the Compass app to the CODEX platform loosely through the Compass backend including the new surveys downloader, which will be installed locally at the NUM sites.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.


References

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