Can the Austrian Nation-Wide EHR System Support the Recruitment of Trial Patients?

Automatic comparison of routinely collected EHR data with trial eligibility criteria can speed up patient recruitment. The present work aims to analyze to what extent the Austrian nation-wide EHR system ELGA could support this task. Using the open source tool ART-DECOR we tried to map a reference list of 150 common eligibility criteria specified in the EHR4CR project to the HL7 CDA templates that describe the structure of ELGA document types. For 61% of the criteria mappings could be made to ELGA template elements holding structured data. Comparing our results with similar work, we conclude that ELGA could be a useful component for the automatic identification of trial patients.