Virtualization of Open-Source Secure Web Services to Support Data Exchange in a Pediatric Critical Care Research Network.

OBJECTIVES: To examine the feasibility of deploying a virtual web service for sharing data within a research network, and to evaluate the impact on data consistency and quality.MATERIAL AND METHODS: Virtual machines (VMs) encapsulated an open-source, semantically and syntactically interoperable secure web service infrastructure along with a shadow database. The VMs were deployed to 8 Collaborative Pediatric Critical Care Research Network Clinical Centers.RESULTS: Virtual web services could be deployed in hours. The interoperability of the web services reduced format misalignment from 56% to 1% and demonstrated that 99% of the data consistently transferred using the data dictionary and 1% needed human curation.CONCLUSIONS: Use of virtualized open-source secure web service technology could enable direct electronic abstraction of data from hospital databases for research purposes.