Legal requirements on secondary use of medical data in the EU and USA – A case study

The use of secondary data in health care research has become a very important issue over the past few years. Data from the treatment context are being used for evaluation of medical data for external quality assurance, as well as to answer medical questions in the form of registers and research databases. Additionally, the establishment of electronic clinical systems like data warehouses provides new opportunities for the secondary use of clinical data. Because health data is among the most sensitive information about an individual, the data must be safeguarded from disclosure.

Automated generic integration of flight logbook data into aircraft maintenance systems

The automated transfer of flight logbook information from aircrafts into aircraft maintenance systems leads to reduced ground and maintenance time and is thus desirable from an economical point of view. Until recently, flight logbooks have not been managed electronically in aircrafts or at least the data transfer from aircraft to ground maintenance system has been executed manually. Latest aircraft types such as the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 787 do support an electronic logbook and thus make an automated transfer possible. A generic flight logbook transfer system must deal with different data formats on the input side – due to different aircraft makes and models – as well as different, distributed aircraft maintenance systems for different airlines as aircraft operators. This article contributes the concept and top level distributed system architecture of such a generic system for automated flight log data transfer. It has been developed within a joint industry and applied research project. The architecture has already been successfully evaluated in a prototypical implementation.