Overcoming Borders with Data: New Solution for International Clinical Trials
09 July, 2025
A new tool automatically converts incompatible data formats, thereby facilitating international research. It was developed by UAS Technikum Wien and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, which published a paper on the subject.
Researchers at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute have jointly published a paper entitled “OMOP-on-FHIR: Integrating the Clinical Data Through FHIR Bundle to OMOP CDM.” The paper is part of the official proceedings of the Medical Informatics Europe Conference 2025.
Need for cross-border clinical trials
The globalization of healthcare and medical research is leading to an increasing need for cross-border clinical trials, which rely heavily on the integration and analysis of data from different healthcare systems. A major problem here is that health data is stored and structured differently in different countries and regions for analysis purposes. Different healthcare institutions use different data models, which makes it difficult to exchange and evaluate data in a uniform manner.
To solve this challenge, this paper has designed a kind of “translation engine” that automatically converts data from the FHIR format (=Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), as used in modern clinics, into the OMOP CDM (=Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model) – a globally established data model that was developed explicitly for analysis purposes.
Researchers no longer have to convert data manually
An ETL process (=Extract, Transform, Load) extracts the data from its original source, adapts it, and loads it into a standardized format. This means that researchers no longer have to laboriously convert the data manually, but can use it directly. This allows routine data from everyday hospital life to be used for research purposes, such as analyzing the effectiveness of drugs based on real patient data from different countries.
Efficient linking of data from patient care and medical research
The combination of OMOP (for large-scale data analysis) and FHIR (for real-time exchange of clinical data) enables the efficient linking of data from patient care and medical research. This is particularly helpful in international studies, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic, where large, reliable data sources from different countries had to be accessed quickly.
The concept presented in the paper was developed as part of the EU-funded project IDERHA (=Integration of Intelligent Data and Evidence Towards Regulatory Acceptance), which aims to promote interoperable health data infrastructures to better share, understand, and use health data from different sources—for example, for medical research or improved patient care.
Paper available for download as a PDF file:
Paper titled „OMOP-on-FHIR: Integrating the Clinical Data Through FHIR Bundle to OMOP CDM“
Further Links:
Faculty of Computer Science & Applied Mathematics
Faculty of Life Science Engineering
Integration of Heterogeneous Data and Evidence towards Regulatory and HTA Acceptance (IDERHA)
UAS Technikum Wien is working on the European Health Data Space with