Thien, Actually, a great place to start would be the attached paper, "An Informatics Architecture for the Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit" from CBMS 2011, describing an effort to do data management at Children's Hospital LA in a way that can scale to multiple institutions, using OODT principles and components. There are a number of VPICU team members on this list (from both CHLA and JPL) who would be happy to answer your questions, on the list or offline.
My perspective is the following: data integration and management in large medical institutions and organizations is HARD. That is a simple fact, and any company or organization who claims to have an out-of-the-box solution is either deluded or lying. There is some amount of DYI (do it yourself) that is unavoidable, and so -- in my opinion -- it's best to go with something that gives you a lot of interoperable but loosely coupled tools, components, and modules that save you bits of work here and there but are also easily modified or extended. From that standpoint, OODT and the larger Apache ecosystem are quite suitable. As for specifics, I'd recommend diving into the FileManager and WorkFlowManager components, though perhaps others would offer different advice. Anyway, sounds like you're clearly heading in the same direction we are, so we'd be happy to chat more! Dave On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 9:27 AM, Nguyen, Thien <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, > > I'm a medical informatics software developer at the Boston Department of > Veteran Affairs. We are reviewing tools to prototype for use in our systems > that would help manage, share, and track research information. We have > genomic data, health records, phenotypic data, and results of nlp/machine > learning techniques. > > OODT sounds like a nice package that we would like to try out, but, honestly, > the website says very little. I'm not even sure where to begin to even try > interacting with the downloaded source. Any direction on how to get started > or lower-level resources to read up on would be greatly appreciated. > > Thanks, > Thien >
