Background: Reuse of EHR data for selecting patients who are eligible for clinical research can substantially improve the recruitment process. ART-DECOR is an open-source tool that is commonly used to design and publish HL7 V3 templates of national (e.g. ELGA) and international EHR initiatives.

Objectives: Extend ART-DECOR to allow the definition of criteria that may be used for patient selection.

Methods: Using the native ART-DECOR development framework we extended existing ART-DECOR template associations by allowing conditions to be formulated.

Results: An editor for the specification of conditions was implemented. The resulting criteria are internally translated to XPath expressions and can be immediately applied to CDA documents. As a prototypical application of our approach we implemented a “Trial Criteria Evaluator” tool that allows trial eligibility criteria to be composed of our ART-DECOR criteria and have them checked against a patient's CDA documents.

Conclusion: Referring to HL7 templates, our criteria can be applied to documents of national EHR systems such as ELGA and hereby reach a broad patient cohort. Implementing our approach within ART-DECOR alleviates its reuse and enhancement by other researchers.