A Conceptual Framework for Clinical Data Warehouses

In order to support the analysis of the information transformation process, quality, outcome, and cost of care delivered at a medical institution, an environment that integrates data from multiple clinical, administrative and financial systems is necessary. This integration becomes essential to facilitate the access and retrieval of the varieties of information. We propose how to rapidly specify a clinical data warehouse taking into account the value chain of a health care institution and covering three different layers of data analysis. In order to assess our proposal, we have developed an environment called FBCDataWare with data warehouse and clinical data repository capabilities that has been validated at the Unit of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery/Fundação Bahiana de Cardiologia.