A smart healthcare portal for clinical decision making and precision medicine.

There has been an unprecedented generation of healthcare data at clinical practices. With the availability of advanced computing frameworks and the ability to electronically mine data from disparate sources (e.g. demographics, genetics, imaging, treatment, clinical decisions, and outcomes) big data research in medicine has become a very active field of interest. In this paper, we discuss the challenges associated with designing clinical decision support systems that try to leverage such disparate data sources and create smart healthcare tools to aid medical practitioners for better patient care and treatment plans. We next propose an integrated data curation, storage and analytics portal, called HINGE (the Health Information Gateway and Exchange application), that can effectively address many of the outstanding challenges in this domain. HINGE specifically caters to healthcare data from radiation oncology patients however, the underlying formalisms and principles, as discussed here, are readily extendible to other disease types making it an attractive tool for the design of next generation clinical decision support systems.