Data Warehousing in Hospitals -A Requirements Analysis

摘要

In hospitals large amounts of data are stored within different systems. Typically, the systems are heterogeneous and each of them has been designed to support a special part of the daily business process in an efficient way. Considering the great amount of information available in the different systems one can imagine the potential for knowledge acquisition when accessing the systems in an integrated way. Due to heterogeneity issues and since complex queries would seriously affect the overall system performance the demand to integrate the relevant data physically becomes evident. Data warehouse technology has been proven to be adequate to support decision making processes and knowledge acquisition by providing concepts to issue complex multidimensional requests against integrated data sources. This paper focuses on several aspects concerning the employment of data warehouse concepts in a large project for a corporation of four Austrian hospitals.