Healthcare Data Warehouse: All You Need to Know
The healthcare industry has observed a whole lot of consequential changes and developments over the past decade. There’s Telehealth, EMR, and countless other such innovations have changed how we go about work in this industry. Amid this crowd of healthcare innovations, there is one more name that has gained quite a bit of traction lately: Healthcare data warehousing.
But what is Healthcare Data Warehousing?
It is a centralized repository that stores electronic health records and clinical data. Retrieved from disparate sources, processed, analyzed, and distributed, it helps facilitate data-driven decisions in minutes.
In my opinion, it helps transform organizational data into accessible, actionable information. It drives quality improvement across clinical outcomes, patient experience, and operational efficiency. And, with the help of an experienced data analytics company you can develop data and metrics as valuable assets to improve standardization and transparency.
Listed below are some of the key benefits of a data warehouse in healthcare to help you understand why they are so popular.
1. Easily one of the most compelling benefits of a healthcare data warehouse is the ability to access all of the data from a single dashboard. You see, for a hospital to ensure seamless operations, it is critical to be able to access data without a fuss at all times. A data warehouse lets you do precisely that.
2. Since all of the company’s data is brought together under one platform, it is that much easier to glean insights out of the abundance of data healthcare businesses tend to collect. Among all the advantages, such insights are crucial to identify trends in the sector as well as those related to this business’ operations, processes, etc. This information, then, can be used to adapt operations and make adjustments to achieve better results.
To make an informed choice, let’s look at the basic architecture of a robust healthcare data warehouse.
1. Data source layer: Data gathered from both external and internal sources
2. Staging area: At this point, data undergoes through the ETL or the ELT process
3. Data storage layer: This is inclusive of centralized and structured storage of data
4. Analytics and business intelligence: This includes mining, reporting, analytics, etc.
Now, let’s talk about the key features you should look for in a healthcare data warehouse.
1. Data storage: The solution you pick should offer streamlined data storage, i.e. well-integrated, subject-oriented & properly summarised. Also be sure to carefully consider different healthcare data storage environment options, i.e. on-premise, cloud, and hybrid.
2. Security: Of course, security is critical in this context as well, since you store a whole world of highly sensitive data about patients as well as the business, of course. So, look for a solution that offers multi-factor authentication, granular control over security, continuous assessment for vulnerability & threat detection among other things. Also, don’t forget to look for the kind of data encryption it offers across the board, type of data masking, etc.
3. Data integration: A healthcare database comprises data sourced from a variety of channels, so high levels of data integration abilities are a must. Find a solution that can ingest not only structured but also semi-structured and unstructured data. It should also be able to offer controlled data management and loading among other things.
Healthcare data warehousing may seem like a Herculean task, but the truth remains that it is vital to achieving better outcomes, reducing costs, and addressing countless other challenges. So, what are you waiting for? Find yourself a trusted vendor for healthcare data warehouse solutions and get started right away.
