Design & development of customizable web API for interoperability of antimicrobial resistance data

Abstract

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health emergency. Complementary to developing new drugs, AMR can be monitored and controlled through cost-effective active surveillance of resistance. As an initiative to monitor resistance, countries all across the globe are collecting data using a variety of surveillance tools. Moreover, hospitals routinely collect the AMR data for treatment which is being stored in their Laboratory and Hospital Information systems (LIS-HIS). The generated clinical data is collected & stored in various formats, making it very difficult to analyze and generate national reports. To integrate the stored clinical data for predictive modeling and analysis, there is an immediate need for a one-stop data repository capable of importing and exporting data in simple data exchange formats (CSV/Excel). The paper highlights the design & development of i-DIA, a python-based web API to facilitate the interoperability of AMR data by automatically importing the bulk of medical data from CSV files into generic data management and analysis system. The i-DIA has been integrated and tested with the ICMR’s AMR surveillance network on in-house developed software, i-AMRSS. The i-AMRSS is presently collecting data from 31 laboratories across India and i-DIA has been used to import data generated from LIS & HIS of a few hospitals directly into the system. The paper also proposes the complete web-based framework (an extension of i-DIA) integrated with peer-to-peer system architecture.