Integrating Different Grain Levels in a Medical Data Warehouse Federation

Healthcare organizations practicing evidence-based medicine strive to unite their data resources in order to achieve a wider knowledge base for sophisticated research and matured decision support service. The central point of such an integrated system is a data warehouse, to which all participants have access. In order to insure a better protection of highly sensitive healthcare data, the warehouse is not created physically but as a federated system. The paper describes the conceptual design of a health insurance data warehouse federation (HEWAF) aimed at supporting evidence-based medicine. We address a major domain-specific conceptual design issue: the integration of low-grained, timesegmented data into the traditional warehouse, whose basic grain level is higher than that of the time-segmented data. The conceptual model is based on a widely accepted international healthcare standard. We use ontologies of the data warehouse domain, as well as of the healthcare and pharmacy domains, to...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAWAK
• Authors: Marko Banek, A. Min Tjoa, Nevena Stolba
• Keywords: Data Warehouse, Data Warehouse Federation, DAWAK 2006, Evidence-based Medicine, Information Management