Data Warehousing for Clinical Research

Abstract

SynonymsClinical research chartDefinitionThe clinical datawarehouse allows rapid querying and reporting across patients.It is used to support the discovery of new relationships betweenthe cause and effects of diseases, and to find specific patientsthat qualify for research studies.Historical BackgroundInhealthcare, the term ``data warehouse'' is generally reservedfor those databases optimized for analysis and integratedqueries across patient populations. This is as opposed to thetransactional database, which is optimized for rapid updatingand highly specific kinds of retrieval (like those based upon aspecific patient identifier).There appear to be threefundamentally different approaches to organizing the healthcaredata warehouse. The first is to extract tables from thetransaction systems of the healthcare organization and load theminto the database platform of the data warehouse with minimaltransformation of the data model. The codes ...