Clinical Data Mart

Clinical Data Mart Overview

Clinical Data Mart (CDM) allows for data to be fetched in bulk from the EHR (Cerner) into a REDCap project. CDM must be initiated on the project creation page and the ability to create a CDM project is managed through the REDCap user profile. To retrieve the desired data, a fetch request must be created and within that request the date range in which to look, specific data elements, and a list of MRNs must be specified. These three requirements can be provided at the time of project creation or after creation from within the Clinical Data Mart page. CDM historically was best suited for researchers who are conducting retrospective studies and need to pull EHR data once and with minimal updating.  

The Data Mart feature is used for importing patient data in bulk into a REDCap project. While CDP is meant for pulling one patient at a time, Data Mart can pull dozens or hundreds of patients’ data into REDCap all at once. Like CDP, Data Mart is using the CDIS infrastructure, so it only needs to be set up once, after which both CDP and Data Mart will utilize it.

Instructions

To use the Data Mart feature and create a Data Mart project, a user must be given explicit permissions for this by a REDCap administrator. Once permissions are granted, users can navigate to the Create New Project page in REDCap to see a new option to create a Clinical Data Mart project.

Once the project has been created, the whole structure of the project (i.e., the fields and forms) will be pre-defined. To begin pulling clinical data from Cerner, the user must navigate to the Clinical Data Mart page using the link on the left-hand project menu. On that page, they may request changes to their existing Data Mart configuration (if they wish to add new MRNs, new fields, or modify the date range) and/or pull data from the EHR using the “Fetch clinical data” button near the top of the page. By default, users will only be able to pull data just one time and will not be able to modify the Data Mart configuration after initially being set when the project is created. However, an administrator can change these settings (see below) on the Project Setup page so that they may pull data as often as they wish or to allow them to make configuration changes when needed.