The German Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) aims to increase the interoperability and reuse of clinical routine data for research purposes. One important result of the MII work is a German-wide common core data set (CDS), which is to be provided by over 31 data integration centers (DIZ) following a strict specification. One standard format for data sharing is HL7/FHIR. Locally, classical data warehouses are often in use for data storage and retrieval. We are interested to investigate the advantages of a graph database in this setting. After having transferred the MII CDS into a graph, storing it in a graph database and subsequently enriching it with accompanying meta-information, we see a great potential for more sophisticated data exploration and analysis. Here we describe the extract-transform-load process which we set up as a proof of concept to achieve the transformation and to make the common set of core data accessible as a graph.
Keywords: Core Data Set; Data Exploration; Data Integration; Graph Database; HL7/FHIR.