ADT2FHIR a tool for converting ADT/GEKID oncology data to HL7 FHIR resources

Abstract

Harmonized and interoperable data management is a core requirement for federated infrastructures in clinical research. Institutions participating in such infrastructures often have to invest large degrees of time and resources in implementing necessary data integration processes to convert their local data to the required target structure. If the data is already available in an alternative shared data structure, the transformation from source to the desired target structure can be implemented once and then be distributed to all participants to reduce effort and harmonize results. The HL7® FHIR® standard is used as a basis for the shared data model of several medical consortia like DKTK and GBA. It is based on so-called resources which can be represented in XML. Oncological data in German university hospitals is commonly available in the ADT/GEKID format. From this common basis we conceptualized and implemented a transformation which accepts ADT/GEKID XML files and returns FHIR resources. We identified several problems with using the general ADT/GEKID structure in federated research infrastructures, as well as some possible pitfalls relating to the FHIR need for resource ids and focus on semantic coding which differs from the approach in the ADT/GEKID standard. To facilitate participation in federated infrastructures, we propose the ADT2FHIR transformation tool for partners with oncological data in the ADT/GEKID format.