Secondary uses of EHR systems: A feasibility study

This paper proposes a data warehouse architecture based on the Electronic Health Record (EHR) technological infrastructure developed in Italy. The adoption of EHRs can represent a possible solution to integrate data provided by different information sources transforming them into useful knowledge. This allows to define metrics and assessment of clinical performance as well as to take corrective actions to support better business decision-making. The paper describes the main advantages in the application of EHR for secondary purposes and reports the data warehouse design framework outlining its architecture as well as examples of business process dimensional models based on a set of clinical indicators defined to manage the intervention of patients with diabetes.