EURECA aims to build an advanced, standards-based and scalable semantic integration environment enabling
seamless, secure and consistent bi-directional linking of clinical research and clinical care systems to: 1.Support
more effective and efficient execution of clinical research by Allowing faster eligible patient identification and
enrolment in clinical trials, Providing access to the large amounts of patient data, Enabling long term follow
up of patients, Avoid the current need for multiple data entry in the various clinical care. 2.)Allow data mining
of longitudinal EHR data for early detection of patient safety issues related to therapies and drugs that would
not become manifest in a clinical trial either due to limited sample size or to limited trial duration, 3:)Allow for
faster transfer of new research findings and guidelines to the clinical setting (from bench-to-bedside), 4.) Enable
healthcare professionals to extract in each patient’s case the relevant data out of the overwhelmingly large
amounts of heterogeneous patient data and treatment information. At the core of the project will be achieving
semantic interoperability among EHR and clinical trial systems, consistent with existing standards, while
managing the various sources of heterogeneity: technology, medical vocabulary, language, etc. This requires
the definition of sound information models describing the EHR and the clinical trial systems, and capturing the
semantics of the clinical terms by standard terminology systems. The scalability of the solution will be achieved
by modularization, identifying core data subsets covering the chosen clinical domains. We demonstrate and
validate concepts developed in EURECA by implementing a set of software services and tools that we deploy
in the context of pilot demonstrators. EURECA will develop solutions that fulfill the data protection and security
needs and the legal, ethical and regulatory requirements related to linking research and EHR data.