DATA WAREHOUSE IS AN IMPORTANT COMPONENT FOR THE COMPUTER-BASED PATIENT RECORD
As the practice of medicine has advanced, so have the information systems required to manage the clinical and administrative data involved in the growing complexity of healthcare. According to Star Ault and Gerard Nussbaum of Hamilton HMC, a data warehouse is an important information technology tool that can help the healthcare institution meet these challenges.
In an article written for Journal of Healthcare Information Management, Ault and Nussbaum discuss the relationships of the data warehouse, data repository, computer-based patient record (CPR) and lifetime clinical record.
The data warehouse has often been inaccurately described as any large accumulation of data. A data warehouse is actually a physically separate, enterprise-wide, database used to support the decision making process by a defined management structure. It organizes and stores data required for retrospective analysis, such as the use of clinical data for epidemiological studies. Since it is not considered to be a dynamic application itself, data are provided by the dynamic operational application systems that support the day-to-day data business functions.
The CPR has been a long-term goal of information management professionals in all disciplines of healthcare and data warehouse technology is crucial to support it. The data warehouse may play a significant role in providing an easily accessible, complete, and reliable source of information that helps integrate all levels of care.
The essential benefit of the data warehouse as a supporting technology for the CPR is its query-driven nature. A clinician can obtain a comprehensive picture of the status of a patient, past events, and trends through the data that are in the data warehouse.
Data warehouse technology has been proven in a number of industries outside healthcare and it can be a key technology component for building the CPR. However, the data warehouse is not the only component necessary for the CPR. The successful completion of a CPR project rests on merging new and exciting technology with proven development and implementation processes based on planning and careful management.
For a full copy of the article, Best Little Data Warehouse, please contact Mary Collins at (404) 253-0335; FAX (404) 873-5493; email mlcoll@kurtsalmon.com.
Hamilton HMC is a management consulting firm specializing in healthcare. The firm helps clients become better competitors in delivering healthcare through strategic, information technology, facility, and operations planning and implementation. Hamilton HMC has offices throughout the United States and is a division of Kurt Salmon Associates, Inc., the world's leading management consulting firm committed exclusively to healthcare, retail and consumer products industries with offices around the globe.