John R. Windle COBRE Abstract

Project Summary/Abstract: Windle Supplement Project

Project Summary:
In 2026, despite decades of effort, clinical data interoperability is still primarily achieved through the exchange of text-based documents. Clinical decision support, performance assessment, quality reporting and clinical research all depend heavily on manual data translation by trained clinical experts, often on a case-by-case basis of the requisite structured, computable clinical data. Furthermore, once in computable/tabular form there is often loss of context requiring a process termed “extract, transform, load” (ETL) to connect the tabular data. While natural language processing and generative AI may speed the extraction process, these technologies still require significant human oversight to achieve the necessary precision for research and clinical care. Through the CardX domain of the HL7 CodeX FHIR Accelerator, we will specify a minimum core CARdiovascular Data (mCARD) terminology set of over 250 high-value, standards-based, open-source, context-specific, and interoperable clinical concepts for cardiovascular medicine, bringing those concepts forward as a FHIR Standard for Trial Use via HL7 balloting. When implemented, we believe that mCARD will reduce the burden of data abstraction, reduce the need extraction, transform load (ETL) between data tables, and improve the reliability, transparency, and interpretability of artificial intelligence algorithms. Ultimately, the intent is for select mCARD terms to be incorporated into a cardiovascular domain of USCDI+. We believe this platform is scalable to other disciplines and will accelerate the development and deployment of key clinical concepts as data standards across the health ecosystem.
Specific Aims:
The overall goal of the project is to develop clinical, technical, and informatics specifications for over 250 key cardiovascular clinical concepts as open-source, FHIR-enabled, natively interoperable terms for use across all data use cases in healthcare.
Aim 1: Convene a multidisciplinary team of cardiovascular stakeholders to establish a base set of key clinical concepts for patient care, quality assessment, and clinical research.
Aim 2: Validate the platform for the rapid development and real-world deployment of mCARD based on Universal Interoperability Platform (the Tcheng-Windle metadata model and KOMET terminology management system).
Aim 3: Promote the key clinical concepts established in mCARD through the HL7 standards approval process, validated through a Connectathon as a Standard for Trial Use (STU) 1.