Project Description
Academic medical centers and health systems are increasingly challenged with supporting appropriate secondary uses of data from a multitude of sources. To that end, the UW Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) has emerged as a central port for all data that can include clinical, research, administrative, financial and other data types. Although EDWs have been popular and successful in providing a single stop for data, they are often not self-service and require an informatician or clinical informatics expert to access.
We developed an easy-to-use, self-service, web-based tool for querying, browsing, and extracting clinical cohorts from the UW Medicine EDW called Leaf. Leaf enables querying by data dictionaries, or ontologies, and allows both de-identified and identified access to patient data, and grants access to these datasets in a compliant manner. While Leaf provides basic visualizations, it contains robust tools for exporting directly to REDCap projects. The users of Leaf include both quality improvement and research investigators and has been developed using an Agile development process with a soft production roll-out to identify and address software, support and data quality concerns.
