Integrating clinical data from multiple sources, using a data mart

Abstract

Many healthcare organisations have seen tremendous increase in the volume and complexity of healthcare data. Oftentimes healthcare data is stored in many dispersed databases, duplicated in many cases and stored in a variety of formats. The process of producing information from these multiple dispersed systems is quite difficult and time consuming. Consequently essential information required to make medical decision and improve healthcare service delivery is not readily available for medical practitioners and healthcare providers. Delivering quality healthcare requires the integration of healthcare information from many different sources, and healthcare providers must be able to readily access and use the right information at the right time in order to improve the quality of health service delivery. A variety of approaches are available to integrate healthcare information stored in many different sources. However they are limited in their application. This research uses a data mart model to integrate clinical data from the multiple clinical data sources gathered by MENTORS project at the Infectious Disease Institute Ltd (IDI) to ease analysis of clinical data and improve availability of information used for decision making and clinical research.