Data analytics has become an essential tool for the healthcare industry. This need has been driven by the increase in data collection following the adoption of mobile medical devices, electronic records and healthcare CRM.
Data warehouse enables healthcare service providers to analyze patient data and make it accessible, thus facilitating better clinical and operational decisions.
Read on to get a comprehensive view about the basics and the benefits of Data Warehousing.
What are the different types of Data Warehouse Systems?
Enterprise Data Warehouse
A centralized warehouse providing decision support service across the organization
Offers an integrated approach for organizing and representing data
Subject driven data classification and access
Operational Data Store
Data store required when neither Data warehouse nor Online transaction processing
systems support organizations reporting needs
Data Warehouse is refreshed in real-time
Data Mart
A subset of data warehouse
Designed for a specific line of business
Data Warehouse allows healthcare organizations to comprehensively and systematically measure many different disease conditions, care delivery processes and operations, and then produce analytics that lead to decisions for improvement. Let us look into the main components of Data Warehouse in the Healthcare Industry-
Data source layer
Healthcare data from internal and external data sources including ERP, EHR/EMR, CRM, claims management system, pharmacy management systems, etc.
Staging Area
Intermediate temporary storage, where healthcare data undergoes the extract, transform and load (ETL) or the extract, load and transform (ELT) process
Data Storage Layer
A centralized structured storage with healthcare DWH subsets oriented to a specific business line or departments
Analytics and BI
Includes business analytics, data mining, data reporting and visualization tools
Helps access data from a single dashboard, thus meeting reporting mandates
Identify trends and insights related to operations, finances and quality of care
Streamline operations to increase productivity of decision makers
Facilitates the implementation of best practices
Individualize disease management
Facilitate research that is needed to develop new treatment programs and support clinical trials
Data warehouses may be relatively new to the healthcare provider environment, but they have been in use in other industries for many years, particularly in retail and manufacturing. With healthcare generating much more data than the retail industry, the opportunities to harness that data and then manage and manipulate it in such a way that it provides similar benefits to all organizational stakeholders are significant