A Clinical Data Warehouse Architecture based on the Electronic Healthcare Record Infrastructure

The development of clinical data warehouses is becoming increasingly important in the healthcare domain to support organizations in the improvement of decision-making, business processes as well as the communication between clinicians, patients and the administration. However, data and process integration is a big challenge considering the heterogeneous and distributed nature of healthcare information systems. This paper proposes a data warehouse architecture based on the Italian Electronic Health Record (EHR) technological infrastructure. It describes the main advantages in the application of EHR systems for secondary purposes and reports the data warehouse design framework outlining its architecture as well as a dimensional model based on a dashboard defined to manage the intervention of patients with diabetes. The adoption of EHR systems enhances interoperability given that these systems share standardized clinical data among multiple parties involved in different healthcare settings.