Implementing patient recruitment on EURECA semantic integration platform through a Groovy query engine

A substantial amount of clinical trials are subject to failure because they cannot recruit sufficient patients within the foreseen time and budget. Computer assisted evaluation of eligibility criteria is envisaged to improve the recruitment process by increasing coverage (i.e. making sure no eligible patients are `missed') and speeding up the eligibility scanning process; and thus eventually reduce the overall failure rate of clinical trials. In this paper a new recruitment application is presented which assists in evaluating eligibility criteria based on available clinical patient data (e.g. Electronic Health Record data). The application leverages for the querying of clinical data on a generic semantic integration platform and a new Domain Specific Language (DSL) based on the Groovy programming language.