The Acquisition of Structured Clinical Data from a Document-Based Electronic Medical Record System.

Abstract

Our hospital stores all clinical records as Portable Document Formats (PDFs). These PDFs are delivered by each system with a document profile XML file. Using this interface, the items thought to be important for clinical studies are described in the document profile XML and delivered to the data warehouse (DWH). In case clinical data not stored in the DWH are needed, we extract the data from PDF documents. Even from scanned PDFs, the data can be extracted with high accuracy.