An informative system for structured data management to build a cardiological multidimensional database

To collect clinical data generated during patient care in a multidisciplinary environment an informative system should manage each clinical aspect of involved disciplines. In this project we developed an application of what we call a Dynamic Dataset Definition (D³) that allows rapid system deployment due to its capability of building a graphical interface directly related to a definition of collectable data. It is sufficient to initialize the system with a minimal data-set, not yet completely established, and let to successive steps to refine detailed information with current clinical use, where annotations are followed by an immediate program changes. Moreover, in a multidisciplinary clinical environment, information is shared providing a partial view on the common defined dataset, in order to inherit data definitions of shared parameters and let them to be displayed and/or entered by several physicians. At last, the physician will retrieve information based on his personal choice or by a common scheme or calculated indexes, with a final generation of a WEB based report. This system has been implemented in a network environment to guarantee an effortless data sharing between physicians, and tested in a Cardiology and Cardiac Surgery departments at our institute. Presently, 12 clinical subsystems are based on this model and more than 270,000 parameters have been collected on 1200 patients since August 2001 to August 2002.