Tool Support and Data Management for Business Analytics Applications in Healthcare

The data delivery architectures in most enterprises are complex and under documented. When a healthcare manager looks at a report, they want to know exactly what each element or technical expression on a report means, where the values shown originate from and how often they are getting updated. We propose a tool framework that includes: a metadata repository for enterprise data consolidated in the data warehouse; a systematic approach to data lineage mappings across the enterprise data architecture to link business analytics data back to the metadata repository; and tool support to manage metadata, link to it directly from reports, and keep metadata in synch with the data warehouse. We illustrate and evaluate our approach with a prototype implementation and a case study using a healthcare analytics dashboard for managing hospital acquired infections.