Framework for Data Warehousing and Mining Clinical Records of Patients: A Review

Abstract

The clinical data warehouse (CDW) is a place where health-care providers can gain access to clinical data gathered in the patient care process. It is also anticipated that such data warehouse may provide information to users in areas ranging from research to management. A CDW is a tailored data warehouse for the needs of users in clinical environment. Due to the fast growing data in the health-care sector, there is need for heath industries to open toward adoption of extensive health-care decision support systems. A critical step for achieving precision medicine will be to integrate old and new data into validated information and to convert this information into knowledge directly applicable to diagnosis, prognosis, or treatment. This will entail developing an integrated knowledge environment that continually captures information and grows, accumulates, organizes, and institutionalizes new information, making it accessible to health-care providers. The framework is independent of application domain and would be suitable for users in areas such as data mining and knowledge management. CDWs are complex and time consuming to review a series of patient records. However, it is one of the efficient data repositories existing to deliver quality patient care.