Using the LOINC Semantic Structure to Integrate Community-based Survey Items into a Concept-based Enterprise Data Dictionary to Support Comparative Effectiveness Research.

In designing informatics infrastructure to support comparative effectiveness research (CER), it is necessary to implement approaches for integrating heterogeneous data sources such as clinical data typically stored in clinical data warehouses and those that are normally stored in separate research databases. One strategy to support this integration is the use of a concept-oriented data dictionary with a set of semantic terminology models. The aim of this paper is to illustrate the use of the semantic structure of Clinical LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers, Names, and Codes) in integrating community-based survey items into the Medical Entities Dictionary (MED) to support the integration of survey data with clinical data for CER studies.