Generating a unified database from data sets

#Medical testing and clinical trials generate considerable quantities of data. For a multitude of reasons, there has been little success in establishing a comprehensive database of such data. For example, health care professionals often do not perform medical tests in a structured atmosphere whereby the data from those tests may be recorded in a systematic or meaningful way. Additionally, even when medical tests are performed in a structured atmosphere, such as part of a clinical trial, the clinical trial data may be proprietary to the sponsor of the trial, and not shared with other parties such as sponsors, the regulatory agencies, or the public. Moreover, even if the data were to be shared, the data are typically not collected in the same exact format for each test or each trial, resulting in difficulty categorizing the data in a comprehensible way. Furthermore, attempts at categorizing such data have involved extremely labor-intensive manual mapping of data and classifications.

#FIGS. 1A-1C are examples of labeled data sets according to embodiments of the present invention;

#FIG. 2A is a block diagram of a system that includes a database generator, according to an embodiment of the present invention;

#FIG. 2B is a block diagram illustrating a use of a unified database, according to an embodiment of the present invention;

#Where considered appropriate, reference numerals may be repeated among the drawings to indicate corresponding or analogous elements. Moreover, some of the blocks depicted in the drawings may be combined into a single function.

#In the following detailed description, numerous specific details are set forth in order to provide a thorough understanding of embodiments of the invention. However, it will be understood by those of ordinary skill in the art that the embodiments of the present invention may be practiced without these specific details. In other instances, well-known methods, procedures, components, and circuits have not been described in detail so as not to obscure the present invention.

#Embodiments of the present invention may be used with respect to clinical data, but the invention is not limited to such embodiments. Embodiments may be used with any data system involving large amounts of data that may exist in data sets. Clinical data includes metabolic data, which may include blood pressure data, heart rate data, and other metabolism data, as well as operational data, which may include monitoring data, such as protocol adherence, adverse events, auto-query rate, early termination rate, and screen failure rate, metadata associated with the collection of metabolic data, or other data related to the gathering or processing of data in clinical trials, such as demographic, enrollment, recruitment, and payment data.