Design of a clinical database to support research purposes: Challenges and solutions

The aim of this paper is to propose solutions to challenges faced by database systems for clinical research purposes. Current clinical databases are primarily based on data acquisition for healthcare intentions. However, these healthcare databases lack the data analysis capability for clinical researchers. In order for clinical researchers to use the healthcare databases in an effective manner, such as in their clinical trial studies, challenges of data integration, data storage, and data retrieval in the current healthcare database settings need to be overcome. Our proposed solutions include using: 1) NoSQL to efficiently integrate clinical databases with legacy healthcare databases, (2) entity attribute value model for data retrieval, and (3) warehouse for big data storage.