Through our sister company Portavita we are from now on involved in the EU FP7 COMMODITY12 project.

The aim of COMMODITY12 is to improve the daily care of diabetes and prevent/manage its co-morbities. It will improve health workers' interpretation of the patient medical status and support coordination of the care. Furthermore, the emergence care process will improved by an early warning system, reducing the hospitalization rate of diabetes patients.

We presented our latest addition to the MGRID platform at the november 2011 HL7 RIMBAA international meeting. Our talk about persisting HL7 CDA documents was preceded by some interesting talks about a RIM-based application in Finland and a Drug Information system in Canada.

These two talks clearly demonstrated a number of common themes for RIM-based applications:

For the second year in a row, we attended the annual conference on PostgreSQL Clustering, High Availability and Replication. This year we presented a talk about Implementing MGRID (presentation PDF, 9MB).
Our story starts with Portavita and why we decided to spin off MGRID and develop a Massively Parallel PostgreSQL almost four years ago.

In this post we will demonstrate how to connect to MGRID from a Microsoft .Net application. We will extend the MARC-HI Everest framework to easily operate with the data in this application. There are bits of code present in this post that will only work when you set up a complete project in Visual Studio .Net. For a complete example, you can contact us at info@mgrid.net.

The ability to understand time and date is important for many applications, but it is especially important for medical applications. Medical professionals depend on knowledge of the correct temporal order of patient encounters and clinical observations to make treatment decisions. Clinical research is based upon observations and treatments, and temporal ordering of these events is essential to drawing conclusions from this information. Though generic database servers support times and dates, we describe a use case that is hard to solve in a generic database but easy to implement in MGRID.

On February 16th, the Dutch RIMBAA group will meet at Portavita's office in Amsterdam [1]. During this meeting, we will give a presentation about the following clinical update problem: When new information becomes available, how do you update the structured clinical data repository (CDR)?