¹Berlin Institute of Health at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany
²Medical Data Integration Center, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

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Introduction: The Medical Informatics Initiative (MII) and Network University Medicine (NUM) have established Data Integration Centers (DIC) at German university hospitals and beyond [1]. A key characteristic of these DICs is that they manage large amounts of clinical data standardized according to the specifications of the National Core Dataset (NCD) in HL7 FHIR using terminologies, such as SNOMED CT and LOINC [2].

Objective: The objective of the work described in this article was to develop a web-based dashboard providing an electronic research patient record using the FHIR data from DICs. Its development was, amongst others, motivated by the following needs:

• Showcasing the data stored at the DICs and making it tangible.
• Supporting data engineers with inspecting their FHIR data and debugging associated ETL processes.
• Providing a research patient record, e.g. for clinical trial pre-screening.

A central non-functional requirement was that the implementation should be very simple when it comes to architecture and code structure, to make it easy to maintain and extend over time.

Methods: The dashboard was built as a web application, with a Spring Boot-based server written in Java as the backend. The backend exposes a REST API to the frontend, which is developed using React-JS. To integrate with existing identity and access management (IAM) systems, the dashboard uses an OAuth 2.0 authorization flow through a local KeyCloak server. This IAM server manages roles and users, while the backend of the dashboard defines the specific capabilities and access rights for each role. This setup ensures that access to data and features is granted based on the user's role. Serving as a facade for the DIC's FHIR server, the Dashboard doesn’t directly present the original FHIR data to the frontend. Instead, it transforms the data into Data Transfer Objects (DTOs), enabling greater flexibility with various FHIR data profiles without requiring changes to frontend or backend components. Additionally, this transformation process allows for the augmentation of the data with additional information, using terminology servers for example.

Results: The current version of the dashboard enables both aggregated and individual-level visualizations of FHIR data. At the aggregate level, patients can be filtered and sorted based on criteria like diagnoses. Statistical metrics can also be displayed to provide an overview of trends over various time periods. At the detailed level, FHIR data for a specific patient is shown through multiple views. There are currently 13 different views, each presenting different modules of the NCD. The layout and combination of views is fully customizable by the user, allowing them to adjust the dashboard to their specific needs.

Future work: The development of the dashboard is ongoing. Several features, such as the integration with pseudonymization services, are currently on our roadmap. Additionally, we plan to gradually introduce more views to visualize further modules of the NCD, such as Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) [3].

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.

Literatur

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[2] Ammon D, Kurscheidt M, Buckow K, Kirsten T, Löbe M, Meineke F, Prasser F, Saß J, Sax U, Stäubert S, Thun S, Wettstein R, Wiedekopf JP, Wodke JAH, Boeker M, Ganslandt T. Arbeitsgruppe Interoperabilität: Kerndatensatz und Informationssysteme für Integration und Austausch von Daten in der Medizininformatik-Initiative. Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz. 2024 Jun;67(6):656-667.
[3] Rogge AA, Mukowski-Kickhöfel R, Boeker M, et al. Integrating the Patient Perspective into Healthcare and Real-World Evidence: The Multi-site, Cross-Disease, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Project in the Medical Informatics Initiative (PCOR-MII). J Healthc Inform Res. 2025 Jan. DOI: 10.1007/s41666-025-00187-8