A conceptual framework to design a dimensional model based on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture.

This paper proposes a conceptual framework to design a dimensional model based on the HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) standard. The adoption of this framework can represent a possible solution to facilitate the integration of heterogeneous information systems in a clinical data warehouse. This can simplify the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) procedures that are considered the most time-consuming and expensive part of the data warehouse development process. The paper describes the main activities to be carried out to design the dimensional model outlining the main advantages in the application of the proposed framework. The feasibility of our approach is also demonstrated providing a case study to define clinical indicators for quality assessment.