title: Getting data out of the electronic patient record: critical steps in building a data warehouse for decision support.
abstract: Health care has taken advantage of computers to streamline many clinical and administrative processes. However, the potential of health care information technology as a source of data for clinical and administrative decision support has not been fully explored. This paper describes the process of developing on-line analytical processing (OLAP) capacity from data generated in an on-line transaction processing (OLTP) system (the electronic patient record). We discuss the steps used to evaluate the EPR system, retrieve the data, and create an analytical data warehouse accessible for analysis. We also summarize studies based on the data (lab re-engineering, practice variation in diagnostic decision-making and evaluation of a clinical alert). Besides producing a useful data warehouse, the process also increased understanding of organizational and cost considerations in purchasing OLAP tools. We discuss the limitations of our approach and ways in which these limitations can be addressed.
authors.affiliation: Shared Information Management Services (SIMS) University Health Network, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
authors.forename: A
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ebidia
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mulder
authors.forename: B
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Tripp
authors.forename: M W
authors.initials: MW
authors.lastname: Morgan
mesh_terms: D003628:Database Management Systems; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006785:Hospitals, University; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval; D016347:Medical Records Systems, Computerized / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D009862:Online Systems; D009864:Ontario