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The Clinical Outcomes Assessment Toolkit: A Framework to Support Automated Clinical Records–based Outcomes Assessment and Performance Measurement Research

^a Massachusetts Veterans Epidemiology Research and Information Center (MAVERIC), Veterans Administration Hospital, Boston, MA
^b The Graduate Program in Health Informatics, College of Computer and Information Science and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA
^c Medical Imaging Informatics Group, University of California, Los Angeles, CA.

^_* Correspondence: Leonard W. D'Avolio, PhD, MAVERIC (151MAV), Boston VA HCS, 150 South Huntington Avenue, Jamaica Plain, MA 02130 (Email: ldavolio{at}ccs.neu.edu).

Received for publication: 07/06/07; accepted for publication: 02/11/08.

The Clinical Outcomes Assessment Toolkit (COAT) was created through a collaboration between the University of California, Los Angeles and Brigham and Women's Hospital to address the challenge of gathering, formatting, and abstracting data for clinical outcomes and performance measurement research. COAT provides a framework for the development of information pipelines to transform clinical data from its original structured, semi-structured, and unstructured forms to a standardized format amenable to statistical analysis. This system includes a collection of clinical data structures, reusable utilities for information analysis and transformation, and a graphical user interface through which pipelines can be controlled and their results audited by nontechnical users. The COAT architecture is presented, as well as two case studies of current implementations in the domain of prostate cancer outcomes assessment.

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