Data Reuse Through Anesthesia Data Warehouse: Searching for New Use Contexts.

INTRODUCTION: Due to high volumes of data routinely recorded through Hospital Information System, data reuse has become important in recent years. A data warehouse was developed in the Lille University Hospital to reuse anesthesia data. At the moment, it is mainly used for clinical research, by offering extraction of data tables to answer a clinical question. In this article, we try to identify other contexts of data reuse than the one currently provided by the data warehouse, in comparison with those in the literature.

MATERIAL AND METHODS: A semi-structured interview grid was designed so that to tackle respondents' experience with clinical data reuse, the various contexts in which the data are reused along with the information systems they currently use to proceed and the difficulties they encounter. A semi-inductive thematic analysis process was performed to identify meaningful semantic units and grouped them into thematic categories.

RESULTS: Ten anesthetists were interviewed; three main contexts emerge: research and knowledge discovery, evaluation of professional practices and organizational management. Data are accessed through complicated administrative procedures and clinicians have to perform tasks beyond their competencies.

DISCUSSION: Difficulties encountered when searching for data express the need for easy and continuous access to data.