The E-baby Data Warehouse: A Case Study

Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) require equipment and facilities to assist and monitor premature and some term babies. This equipment outputs physiological and clinical data, but current research does not provide doctors with techniques for capturing this data in a format suitable for analysis and research. Additionally, regional hospitals provide limited NICU support, but without access to a Neonatologist, the baby must be moved to another hospital. This paper details the framework for clinical and physiological data capture, the storage structures within the e-Baby Data Warehouse and information access through a secure Intranet/Internet browser. The key contribution of this work is the infrastructure that provides a platform for patient information data capture, storage, display and analysis. A key benefit of this work is to provide a mechanism for Neonatologists to receive information directly from a regional hospital, thereby preventing, in some cases, the immediate need to move the baby.