An evaluation of the TransFER model for sharing clinical decision-support applications.

TransFER is a formal model designed to facilitate the sharing of decision-support applications across institutions with heterogeneous clinical databases. The TransFER model provides a mechanism to automatically customize database queries based on a reference schema of clinical data and an encoded set of database mappings. In this paper, we describe the elements of the TransFER model and we present the results of a formal evaluation we conducted to assess the utility and generality of the model. The results suggest that the TransFER has significant potential for automating query translation and facilitating application sharing, but that further work on the representation of temporal semantics, on the modeling of missing data, and on the optimization of complex queries is required.