St. Joseph’s Hospital & Medical Center Research Data Archive Center (RDAC)

The Challenge

St. Joseph’s Hospital & Medical Center is the flagship institution to Catholic Healthcare West, the 3rd largest non-profit hospital organization in the United States with 43 hospitals. Fueled by an active Graduate Medical Education program, St. Joseph’s Hospital has been at the forefront of medical research for decades. After Y2K St. Joseph’s Hospital embarked on a vendor evaluation process to select one company to help design a Research Data Archive Center within which data from various hospital information systems would be combined into a cohesive research database. Oracle and IBM were among the vendors evaluated.

Our solution

After an exhaustive evaluation period, Emerge.MD was selected as the vendor of choice to design, deploy and maintain RDAC for St. Joseph’s Hospital. Our solution bound the backend research database directly into the hospital HL7 data stream. Our application deconstructed the HL7 messages and stored the quantum data into a unified research data model on clustered database servers. This proposal gave tremendous breadth to the database as nearly every HL7 transaction at the hospital was captured for storage and retrieval. Finally, in order to add depth to the breadth, we back loaded decades of data from old and often retired hospital information systems. In the end, we delivered a product of unparalleled scale where decades of data from completely disparate information systems could be cross references and queried to facilitate medical research and discoveries. To this date, we continue to manage and improve RDAC for St. Joseph’s Hospital.