Research issues in clinical data warehousing

Abstract

Medical informatics has been an important area for the application of computing and database technology for at least four decades. This area may benefit from the functionality offered by data warehousing. However, the special nature of clinical applications poses different and new requirements to data warehousing technologies, over those posed by conventional data warehouse applications. This article presents a number of exciting new research challenges posed by clinical applications, to be met by the database research community. These include the need for complex data modeling features, advanced temporal support, advanced classification structures, continuously valued data, dimensionally reduced data, and the integration of very complex data. In addition, the support for clinical treatment protocols and medical research are interesting areas for research.