Design and Implementation of an Optimized Data Warehouse for Healthcare Business Intelligence

Abstract

Healthcare is one of the fastest digitally growing industry and is well known for its rich data collection. Latest technology developments offer immense opportunities to healthcare for digitally enabled care delivery and better-quality outcomes through timely decision support. Unlike other industries, where analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) has been successfully deployed, healthcare is still in its early stages of adoption of these technologies. There are many reasons behind it and healthcare is known for late adoption of latest technologies. The objective of this research is to design an optimal framework for Healthcare Enterprise Data Warehouse (DW), to cater the increasing demands of Clinical Business Intelligence (CBI) and Decision Support. This research s outcome is a layered DW model for healthcare BI. This framework is termed as Healthy Enterprise Data Warehouse (HEDW) . HEDW concentrates specifically on the unique nature of the healthcare industry, its associated data and the analytics requirements. newlineA detailed study of features and capabilities of commonly used Tier 1 Hospital Information Systems (HIS) proved to be very useful for this research. Case studies of various healthcare entities that reached the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society s Stage 7 maturity level were analyzed, concentrating on the risks and challenges they faced during the DW implementation. Various types of DW implementations exist in healthcare, but a comprehensive data view, which is agile in nature and covers both the clinical and non-clinical data aspects, is something missing. To close this gap and to cater to the consolidated data view requirements of healthcare, HEDW framework is proposed. Agility and non-redundancy of data is achieved through various layers of the proposed framework. Traditional DW solutions concentrates mostly on the historical data analysis but healthcare demands real-time DW feature too. By utilizing Operational Data Stores (ODS), HEDW facilitates real-time DW and analytics.