The article presents an overview of the various international approaches to this issue and illustrates concepts and solutions which have been published, thus giving an impression of activities pursued in this field of medical informatics. It is based, however, on a presentation of a large variety of historical, but also most recent activities in data warehousing, data retrieval and linking medical informatics with translational research. This paper does not intend to provide a fully comprehensive review on all the issues of clinical routine data reuse. Given this situation, the focus of this paper is to present an overview on exemplary projects, which have already tackled this challenge, reflect on current initiatives within the United States of America and the European Union to establish IT infrastructures for clinical and translational research, and draw attention to new challenges in this area.

Even though today most university hospitals have already implemented commercial hospital information systems and started to build up comprehensive electronic medical records, reuse of such data for data warehousing and research purposes is still very rare.

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