The MGRID clinical data platform is ideally suited for applications that process large sets of medical data. Organizations that have applications based on the medical HL7v3 standard or annotate their data using the SNOMED-CT terminology can benefit from MGRID's native support for HL7 data types and built-in terminology service.

Database support for HL7 datatypes
The HL7 standard is widely used to electronically exchange medical information. As part of the standard, HL7 defines scalar communication data types such as physical quantity, point in time and concept descriptor and also defines complex data types such as interval, collection and probabilistic types. Typical HL7 applications will store their communications in a database, resulting in a translation from HL7 concepts and types into database types. Since the data types were not designed to be implemented in a relational database server, this translation is problematic.

MGRID supports the data types as native types in the database server. It can effectively execute scientific calculations with units of measure, support a large number of operations on time points and intervals, and perform operations that are akin to a medical terminology server. Experiments show that the data types perform on par with the native types of the database server while adding a richness of expression in SQL queries.

Built-in terminology service
Controlled vocabularies play an important role in medical informatics. SNOMED-CT is considered the most comprehensive and widely used code system for clinical information. MGRID enhances semantic interoperability by providing a built-in terminology service that contains SNOMED CT’s entire code system, as well as the standard HL7 code systems.

The medical features are described in depth in the whitepaper Adding HL7 version 3 data types to PostgreSQL (PDF).