Description

Dutch regulations prescribe that (for insurance and quality purposes) hospitals in the Netherlands make an anonymised copy of all their patient data available to a central server, in the so called DICA-registry. This is a process that is currently for the most part carried out manually, patient by patient, at huge cost. The reason is that the internal databases are not aligned well, neither with each other (internal consistency) nor with the format required by DICA.

In this MSc project, your task is to investigate and prototype a solution involving a flexible and extensible transformation of the data, enabling the automation of the above process. This requires bridging on several levels: the technological (taking care of heterogeneous databases) and the conceptual (aligning schemas, possible first defining them). Moreover, the possibility of processing unstructured data should be taken into account.

The concrete context for this project is within the Department of Maxillofacial surgery, Head & Neck oncology of the MST hospital in Enschede. There is urgent need for a solution to this problem, as large financial interests are at stake. A viable solution approach can be reused in other departments and other hospitals.

Additional Resources

1. Final Thesis