Design of Dimensional Model for Clinical Data Storage and Analysis

Abstract

Current research in the field of Life and Medical Sciences is generating chunk of data on daily basis. It has thus become a necessity to find solutions for efficient storage of this data, trying to correlate and extract knowledge from it. Clinical data generated in Hospitals, Clinics & Diagnostics centers is falling under a similar paradigm. Patient’s records in various hospitals are increasing at an exponential rate, thus adding to the problem of data management and storage. Major problem being faced corresponding to storage,  is the varied dimensionality of the data, ranging from images to numerical form. Therefore there is a need for development of efficient data model which can handle this multi-dimensionality data issue and store the data with historical aspect.

For the stated problem lying in façade of clinical informatics we propose a clinical dimensional model design which can be used for development of a clinical data mart. The model has been designed keeping in consideration temporal storage of patient's data with respect to all possible clinical parameters which can include both textual and image based data. Availability of said data for each patient can be then used for application of data mining techniques for finding the correlation of all the parameters at the level of individual and population.