A semantic approach for the homogeneous identification of events in eight patient databases: a contribution to the European eu-ADR project

The overall objective of the eu-ADR project is the design, development, and validation of a computerised system that exploits data from electronic health records and biomedical databases for the early detection of adverse drug reactions. Eight different databases, containing health records of more than 30 million European citizens, are involved in the project. Unique queries cannot be performed across different databases because of their heterogeneity: Medical record and Claims databases, four different terminologies for coding diagnoses, and two languages for the information described in free text. The aim of our study was to provide database owners with a common basis for the construction of their queries. Using the UMLS, we provided a list of medical concepts, with their corresponding terms and codes in the four terminologies, which should be considered to retrieve the relevant information for the events of interest from the databases.