Public Healthcare and Epidemiology with Dr Warehouse

Abstract

The need for the systematic collection and use of epidemiological data, together with the undergoing modernization of the public healthcare system in Serbia, has motivated us to develop Dr Warehouse, an extensible intelligent software system for the collection, presentation, and analysis of data from epidemiological and public healthcare sources. The central point of the system is a data warehouse where medical data about registered disease cases and relevant demographic data are being collected. Through a web application and mobile device client, different categories of users may access data that are of interest to them, perform built-in analyses, or test their own epidemiological hypotheses. Dr Warehouse is expected to provide intuitive visualization of epidemiological data, facilitate discovery of epidemiological knowledge, and support modelling of epidemic dynamics. We discuss our motives for building such a system, the architecture of the system, our choices regarding data modelling, and the built-in functionalities. We implemented a foundation for different analyses that are expected to provide valuable insights if properly adapted and used in practice: investigation of diagnosis change over time, forecasts based on data mining, and compartmental models of disease dynamics.