Data Warehousing for Biomedical Informatics PDF

Preface

For over three decades, data warehouses have been impacting the way we think about and manipulate data, enabling us to analyze and integrate data across our organizations in ways never imagined while designing the operational databases and applications from which our warehoused data were collected. The data warehousing movement has only in recent years crossed over into the biomedical sector. Much of what was learned about data in other sectors is applicable in healthcare, but biomedicine and healthcare offer challenges and complexities never faced in the commercial sector. Everything I learned about data modeling, storage, and querying prior to entering the healthcare sector only served as a starting point for what I would need to know to design and build biomedical data warehouses. I’d never go back; the power of data to promote effective healthcare is too astounding.

Many biomedical or healthcare institutions today are making their own attempts to design and develop data warehouses, usually with some form of clinical or operational focus. One problem with this approach is that, owing to a general lack of IT maturity in the healthcare sector generally, these implementations are often based on concepts and designs that are already seen as largely obsolete in the broader data warehousing community or are being constrained by perceived technological weaknesses that actually haven’t been of paramount concern in database technology for many years. This book offers an up-to-date model that will allow your organization to jump-start, or realign, your implementation efforts, giving you a successful data warehouse implementation that is both quickly implemented and is state of the art.

To be effective, this book covers much more than generalized data warehousing. It specifically addresses biomedical data warehousing for healthcare— a discipline that requires its own knowledge base and design patterns. Biomedical and healthcare warehousing not only requires all of the basic fundamentals of data warehousing in any field, but also requires privacy and consent controls that are unprecedented in other fields, and the integration of imaging and genomic data as modalities that explode data volumes and controls. With the right guidelines, you can build biomedical data warehouses that take these things into account. Implementations can be completed in months that used to take years or that were not even attempted because of their anticipated complexity. This book is about how to do that effectively by applying the learning that I have achieved in numerous healthcare data warehousing settings in recent years, building upon a warehouse design that I have been tuning for over 30 years.

A biomedical data warehouse is a very complex undertaking for any information technology function or group to take on. This book can’t make your implementation easy, but it will make the journey much safer and more enjoyable.