Conquery: an open source application to analyze high content healthcare data

Background: Big data in healthcare must be exploited to achieve a substantial increase in efficiency and competitiveness. Especially the analysis of patient-related data possesses huge potential to considerably improve decision-making processes in the healthcare sector. Most analytical approaches used today are highly time- and resource-consuming. The presented software solution Conquery is an open source software tool providing advanced, but intuitive data analysis without the need for specialized statistical training. Results: Conquery is a column-oriented distributed timeseries database and analysis platform. Its main application is the analysis of per-person medical records by non-technical medical professionals. Complex analyses are realized in the Conquery frontend by dragging tree nodes into the query editor. Queries are evaluated by a bespoke distributed query-engine for medical records in a column-oriented fashion. We present a custom compression scheme to facilitate low response times that uses online calculated as well as precomputed metadata and data statistics. Conclusions: Conquery is an efficient and intuitive open source software for performant and secure data analysis and aims at supporting decision-making processes in the healthcare sector.