Data Management Challenges in Paediatric Information Systems

There is a compelling demand for the data integration and exploitation of heterogeneous biomedical information for improved clinical practice, medical research, and personalised healthcare across the EU. The area of paediatric information integration is particularly challenging since the patient’s physiology changes with growth and different aspects of health being regularly monitored over extended periods of time. Paediatricians require access to heterogeneous data sets, often collected in different locations with different apparatus and over extended timescales. Using a Grid platform originally developed for physics at CERN and a novel integrated semantic data model the Health-e-Child project has developed an integrated healthcare platform for European paediatrics, providing seamless integration of traditional and emerging sources of biomedical data. The long-term goal of the project was to provide uninhibited access to universal biomedical knowledge repositories for personalised and preventive healthcare, large-scale information-based biomedical research and training, and informed policy making. The project built a Grid-enabled european network of leading clinical centres that can share and annotate paediatric data, can validate systems clinically, and diffuse clinical excellence across Europe by setting up new technologies, clinical workflows, and standards. The Health-e-Child project highlights data management challenges for the future of European paediatric healthcare and is the subject of this chapter.