Modern healthcare requires a single, accurate and accessible source of patient data. This is what a clinical data repository (CDR) provides: a vendor‑neutral, standardised and longitudinal record that brings together clinical information from across organisations and systems.
What is a clinical data repository?
A clinical data repository is a centralised database that collects, stores and manages clinical information from multiple sources. Unlike a traditional database or data warehouse, a CDR is:
- Patient-centred: built around a complete longitudinal record for each patient.
- Real‑time: information is updated as care happens, so clinicians always work with the latest data.
- Structured: uses international standards (such as openEHR) so that data is computable and ready for analytics, research and decision support.
- Persistent: data is stored for long‑term use, independent of applications.
This is very different from a clinical data warehouse, which is designed primarily for retrospective analysis and reporting.
A CDR supports live care delivery as well as analytics.
The Better Platform clinical data repository
The Better Platform CDR is a large‑scale, high‑performance, standards‑based solution for storing, managing, querying and exchanging structured health data.
- Data is stored in vendor‑independent archetypes and templates
- Standardised data entry and retrieval with terminology validation
- Interoperability across care providers, care settings, and time
Ready to unify your patient data?
What makes the Better CDR different?
The Better clinical data repository (CDR) is more than just a database. It is a dynamic, event-driven health data platform built for the realities of modern care.
1. Multidisciplinary and longitudinal patient records
- A single source of truth for each patient, integrating clinical and administrative data across multiple care providers and settings.
- Built to support continuity of care from hospital to community to home.
2. Support for structured and unstructured data
- Structured data: medications, vital signs, laboratory results, allergies, diagnoses, care plans
- Unstructured data: scanned notes, free-text narratives, and medical images (e.g. CT scans, X-rays)
This combination ensures that clinicians have a complete, contextual view of each patient’s history, regardless of format.
3. Powerful, vendor‑independent querying
- Data is accessed using AQL (Archetype Query Language), a portable, open standard designed for openEHR-based systems.
- AQL queries can be reused across systems and applications – unlike SQL queries tied to proprietary schemas.
- The platform supports real-time analytics: queries can run on single patient records for point-of-care support, or across populations for research, public health, and quality improvement.
4. Secure, standards-based and event-driven API access
- Event-driven architecture: the CDR can notify subscribing systems of clinical events (e.g. new diagnoses, results, or care plan updates) in real time, enabling proactive care and automation.
- openEHR REST APIs: support core operations such as creating, managing and querying EHR data, managing compositions and templates.
- FHIR APIs: provide an alternative interface for operational data exchange, ideal for workflows that need quick integration.
- Attribute-based access control (ABAC): the CDR includes a granular security model based on user roles, attributes, and context. This ensures that the right data is available to the right person at the right time, with full respect for confidentiality and governance.
5. Built‑in auditing and traceability
Every action performed on the system – whether data creation, modification, query, or event notification – is fully logged. This provides:
- Transparency and accountability
- Support for clinical audit and quality assurance
- Compliance with national and international data protection standards
The architecture of the Better clinical data repository
Semantic interoperability at its heart.
Key components:
- EHR server – manages persistent health data using openEHR standards
- ABAC – fine-grained security model to manage data access
- ETL – Extracts data from the CDR, transformed into flat, analytics-friendly formats,
- Terminology server – centralised, consistent terminology services (SNOMED CT, LOINC, ICD and others)
- Unstructured data store (UDS) – to manage free-text notes, scanned images, and other unstructured content
- Document repository with IHE stack – for storing documents and medical imaging references
All clinical information is linked, enabling a complete and contextual view of the patient.
Ready to begin your transformation?
Talk to our team about how a Postmodern EHR approach can help you create a more flexible, open and patient-centred healthcare IT environment.
