NursingCareWare: Warehousing for Nursing Care Research and Knowledge Discovery

Widespread adoption of healthcare information systems has led to large amounts of patient care data with the potential for improvements in the cost and quality of patient care. However, extracting useful information from these large data sets using current systems is a cumbersome process and it is difficult to effectively utilize the data. This paper addresses is the creation of a multidimensional design to manage complex patient care data. We propose and implement a comprehensive warehouse model that includes nursing diagnoses, outcomes, and interventions. Unlike current systems, our design incorporates all the aforementioned aspects and accommodates their inherent multi-valued nature. The objective is to uncover useful patterns involving existing patient care plans, as well as symptom and disease associations across demographic groups. It is envisaged that this will lead to better treatment plans, and ultimately improve the quality of patient care and the cost of providing it. We describe various warehousing challenges that arise during the development of the warehouse and our plans for evaluation.