At 07:01 AM 6/8/2003 +1000, Tim Churches wrote:
On Sat, 2003-06-07 at 20:08, Adrian Midgley wrote:
> As Tim said, RDBMS are good for searching and reporting (for
> which there is no rush, and which is mainly administrative in
> nature)

I would agree about the no rush bit, but aggregate use of clinical dta
may also be for decision support, quality assurance and epidemiological
purposes (all of which rank slightly higher on the evolutionary scale
than administrative functions in my book). All of these can be satisfied
with a data warehouse, by which I mean a read-only data store structured
for aggregate queries. These days there is no reason for each system (in
each general practice etc) not to have its own data warehouse - its not
a big deal, and does not necessarily imply big-iron mainframes in data
centres (although population data warehouses or registers do imply
this).

I agree completely with this. Basically our medical surveillance system (B-SAFER)
is a data warehouse or more accurate, an operational data store. We can see things
in it that aren't visible in the on-line database system. The data is read only (can't
be edited) and gives a lot of insight into what is going on in the hospital and the city.


Dave


> Single file, object databases, structured messes in buckets, and
> other ways of holding all the information about one patient in
> one lump have advantages in being fast to read and very hard to
> prevent being movable.  That is two of the main priorities for
> doctors.

Bring back PICK, I say (or rather, its popularity).

Tim C

--

Tim C

PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere
or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc
Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B  EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0




Reply via email to