Piql Book of References

The Norwegian Health Archive Case Study

CHALLENGE The Norwegian Health Archive (NHA) carries the responsibility of ensuring that the nation’s health data lives on indefinite ly. The NHA has begun a 10-year project to establish a long term digital archive for medical patient records. This project has global significance for how data can contribute to under standing a nation’s health. This is an ambitious project, collecting decades of records, in both analogue and digital form, and collating and treating all data in a single preservation system. The two main challenges of the project are ingesting the di verse and large amount of data, and ensuring the preserved data is accessible for the future. After receiving the physical and electronic journals of de ceased people from both public and private hospitals, the NHA digitises the analogue records, at a rate of 300,000 im ages per day (300-450 GB). This creates a lossless electronic representation of the records, which then begin ingestion into the preservation system. Simultaneously, digitally born electronic health records (EHRs) are also processed for ingestion. Due to the sheer volume of digital files, ingestion of these files will occur over 10-15 years. After this initial ingestion of records, 50,000 EHRs will be in gested annually, equating to 1TB per year (with each record approximately 20 MB). In addition to the data throughput, the solution must provide data access tools for researchers and next of kin on request, while maintaining the authenticity, confidentiality, scalability, quality, and retention of the content. To find a solution to fit the complex needs of the Norwegian Health Archive, an extensive requirement specification pro cess was conducted, in collaboration with the Norwegian Na tional Archive and Norwegian National Library. As a result of the process, a list of almost 100 requirements was made, asking the market for a state-of-the-art digital preservation system to solve these challenges.

SOLUTION Following a substantial procurement process, Piql won the ten der together with Artefactual Inc, Canada. Our solution pro vides an Archivematica based digital preservation system with complementary modules to ensure reliable ingestion and a flexible health register, compliant with OAIS.

The solution consists of three modules addressing the chal lenges defined by NHA:

Ingestion module This module processes the data and automatically creates Sub mission Information Packages (SIP). This ingestion module has been designed for handling three different types of data: born-digital health data (EHRs), digi tised health files and complementary files. As the EHRs and the digitised records have different format specifications, the module includes a new tool that automatically monitors data validation, triggers data transformations, and creates OIAS compliant SIPs. For the complementary non-patient journal files, another in gestion tool was developed and implemented to perform data validation, metadata descriptions and package creation on these files.

These processes support and ensure the authenticity and qual ity of the SIPs.