Data Repository
MEDITECH's Data Repository provides health care organizations an open environment for powerful reporting and decision-support tools. The integrity and consistency of the Data Repository database results from the tight integration inherent in the MEDITECH
Health Care Information System (HCIS).
By using the Data Repository as a portal, sites may:
- Ceate ad-hoc reports
- Drill down into clinical, administrative, and financial data
- Perform cross-population studies of patients, providers, departments, and more
- Execute complex statistical analysis
- Mine data
- Browse data
- Conduct longitudinal studies
- Employ industry standard OLAP tools.
Standard Features
Industry-Standard Access Tools
The Data Repository employs industry standards such as:
- Microsoft SQL Server® Relational Database Management System
- A database of relational tables, which offers users the ability to custom design queries using third-party software.
Components
The Data Repository is made up of the following components:
- The MEDITECH Data Repository application
- The MEDITECH Data Repository Manager
A database on Microsoft SQL Server.
Flexibility and Ease of Use
- Provides fast, easy generation of reports
- Allows for graphical display of data
- Provides an open environment and assures organizations of a stable and continually-evolving platform
- Supports off-the-shelf, industry standard software tools, like Microsoft Access®, for analysis and presentation of targeted data.
- Incorporates a Universal Data Schema, which establishes one data scheme that's fed by MEDITECH's transaction systems. This enhancement will be helpful for sites in a multi-platform environment.
- Implemented consistent naming conventions and foreign key designations. These standard features offer the following benefits:
-- An environment enabling streamlined report development and updates
-- An environment providing virtually unlimited opportunities for development efforts using the Data Repository as a foundation.
- Tables are defined with clustered indexes, which are based on the primary key constraint on the table. Customers have the flexibility to create additional non-clustered indexes as needed to optimize their unique reporting needs.
Accepts Data from Other Vendors and Industries
The Data Repository provides an open environment where data accumulated from the MEDITECH applications, as well as from non-MEDITECH applications, can be integrated within the HCIS. The Data Repository can collect, store, and report on information from:
- Hospitals
- Ambulatory clinics
- Physicians' practices
- Home health care agencies
- Rehabilitation facilities
- Skilled nursing facilities
- Psychiatric facilities
- Hospice centers
- Independent specialty clinics
- Insurance companies.
Other vendor and industry data can be incorporated into the MEDITECH system in several ways. An organization may employ one or maybe all of the below options:
- Standard interface protocols. Validation and referential integrity checks occur when the data is filed in the application, as with any interfaced data, thus ensuring imported information conforms to the care organization's standards and established no
menclature.
- By filing the data directly to the Microsoft SQL server the new data and associated tables can be correlated seamlessly with existing data in the MEDITECH system.
- Customer-defined screens to capture and report on data from other organizations, including insurance companies (for example, admissions insurance queries).
Enhances Efficiency of Transactional System
Reporting activities performed on the Data Repository do not negatively impact the processing speed of transactions being performed in the HCIS. Physicians, clinicians, and other staff using the MEDITECH HCIS are not adversely impacted by any analyses tak
ing place in the Data Repository.
Access to Health Care Data for Reporting and Decision Support
The Data Repository contains data from the clinical, administrative, and financial applications down to detail level. The Data Repository allows care organizations to:
- Simplify report development through the utilization of standard column naming conventions
- Study data to conduct business and research analyses
- Quickly analyze the broad scope of information and draw conclusions about patient treatment strategies, strategic planning, and outcomes reporting
- Identify cost efficiency levels on an overall organizational basis, and on a provider-by-provider basis.
Powerful Reporting Capabilities
The Data Repository collects information on patients throughout an enterprise, organizes it for study, and makes it completely flexible for intensive reporting and analysis.
Data currently available in the MEDITECH HCIS can be initially loaded into the Data Repository, allowing reporting and decision-support benefits to be realized the day the initial loads have completed.
- Vast storage capacity provides immediate access to comprehensive historical data.
- Data which is updated in an application is also updated in the Data Repository.
- Users can create custom tables, using the industry-standard SQL tools.
- Users may custom-design queries using third-party software to perform unlimited analysis on patient populations.
- Standard views designed to run under Microsoft Access are provided with the Data Repository; if other reporting applications are desired, standard reports may be exported. Some of the areas in which standard views are being researched include:
-- Resource Utilization
-- Indicators
-- Cardiovascular
-- Obstetrics
-- Financials
-- Abstracting
-- Scheduling Performance
-- Physician Evaluation
-- Infection Control
-- Pharmacy Utilization.
Flexible Scalability
Users have the option of selecting either the batch mode or the continuous mode of update.
Batch Mode
Batch processing of transfers from the MEDITECH applications to the SQL database at user-defined times. The update is typically scheduled when network traffic is low, for example, at two or three o'clock in the morning.
Continuous Mode
Continuous processing of transfers from the MEDITECH applications to the SQL database. This mode offers the customer the ability to have the data workload of sending data to the repository to be spread throughout the day.
Security
Access to the data within the Data Repository is completely controlled by the security features inherent in Windows NT and the SQL server. This security is very flexible and can restrict user access to specified tables and/or columns in a table. Row level
security can also be realized by the use of Views.
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