Feasibility and Design of a Tri-Service Database Architecture Allowing Service-Specific and Tri-Service Reporting of Hospitalization Rates for Military Women's Health Research.
Abstract
The overall goal of the project was to determine feasibility for a collaborative data communications infrastructure which would enable medical researchers from any service to access multiservice data. However, each service would maintain its own database. To these ends, the Air Force has examined the feasibility of (1) constructing a research-oriented comprehensive longitudinal database of demographic and medical data, (2) constructing a relational data model which might be usable by DoD researchers, and (3) constructing a user-friendly front end which would be able to access several databases at once and present them to the user in an integrated fashion. Internal cross mapping tables would bridge differences in variable naming and coding conventions. As a feasibility study, Air Force and Navy epidemiologists and statisticians extracted data from their own service data systems on hospitalization rates for women for eight diseases. The two services cooperatively agreed on common analytical methods and naming conventions and were able to produce a comparative report. The findings of this study are reported here. The feasibility study pointed out limitations of this approach, and the project team explored a variety of technical options which would more readily permit sharing of semantically-equivalent data among the services. A major accomplishment of this project was the creation of the Defense Medical and Epidemiological standard data set, which identifies the sharable epidemiological data currently available from the three services. The Air Force continues to pursue this goal in the development of the system initiated during this project. A user interface is being developed which allows the investigator to query more than one database for related information.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 01, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA304579
Entities
People
- John G. Meyer
Organizations
- Armstrong Laboratory