Journal Entry 4

Frances M. Brzycki Module 4

Understanding The Healthcare Database: Purposes, Strengths, and Weaknesses Drew Cardon   URL

Why was this article, blog, post, or multimedia chosen?

I'm always interested in learning what experts deem good design when building Online transactional processing (OLTP) databases.  I access many third party databases and home-grown databases and I’ve seen both good and poor design.  I’m of the opinion solid design is key to building an effective and powerful database tool and the time invested in doing this upfront is well spent. Electronic Health Record (EHR) is an example of an OLTP. The main strength of an OLTP is speed (Cardon, 2011). An example would be to look up the patients vital signs from their last office visit.

What  makes it interesting, appropriate, or reputable? 

Supporting key decision-makers in both the hospital and physician setting I see my share of OLTP clinical systems ranging from CPOE, Finance and claim data to name a few. Some of these databases are integrated and some of them are not.  That is were the challenge exists for both the clinical business users that analyze the data and the information technology department that maintain the backend of these OLTP applications. For instance, our organization just rolled out the ICD-10 codes from ICD-9, needless to say this was a mammoth undertaking with extensive collaboration and coordination between the business and information technology teams.

Is it an opinion? Case study? Research study? Product review? 

This article is an expert opinion by Drew Cardon who specializes in data architect and information technology implementation.

What was the need, problem, issue or trend addressed in the article, blog, post, or multimedia? 

The author wanted to educate the user on how databases worked and the role they play in healthcare. One of the biggest benefits of OLTP is the amount of data that can be captured and stored.  This data can be transformed into business intelligence and enabling key stakeholders to make better informed decision for patient care and cost-saving metrics (Carlson, 2011).  As Carlson pointed out the benefit of having all this data is also a curse.  Too much data can cause information overload to CEOs to clinicians. The information needs to be “targeted and actionable” per Carlson.

What was the solution for which technology had an answer? 

The solution to manage all this data is called “Enterprise Data Warehouse” (EDW).  The database to manage this is called Online Analytical Processing or OLAP for short.  

What implications might this have in healthcare delivery? 

Both OLAP and OLTP have a place in the organization. These are both tools and like any good tool they need to perform the job they were designed to do.  The OLAP tool will focus on analytical data mining and the OLTP tool will focus on the transaction processing regarding data and information for the business.  

What did you learn from it that might have application for your practice? 

Just like a good cook a good software developer has tools that perform specific functions to accomplish a goal and this needs to be kept in mind when feeling overwhelmed with the flood of raw data.

References

Cardon, D. (2011). Understanding The Healthcare Database: Purposes, Strengths, and Weaknesses  

Retrieved from https://www.healthcatalyst.com/healthcare-database-purposes-strengths-weaknesses