The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition

Chapter 14

Healthcare

The healthcare industry is undergoing tremendous change as it seeks to both improve patient outcomes, while simultaneously improving operational efficiencies. The challenges are plentiful as organizations attempt to integrate their clinical and administrative information. Healthcare data presents several interesting dimensional design patterns that we'll explore in this chapter.

Chapter 14 discusses the following concepts:

• Example bus matrix snippet for a healthcare organization
• Accumulating snapshot fact table to handle the claims billing and payment pipeline
• Dimension role playing for multiple dates and physicians
• Multivalued dimensions, such as patient diagnoses
• Supertype and subtype handling of healthcare charges
• Treatment of textual comments
• Measurement type dimension for sparse, heterogeneous measurements
• Handling of images with dimensional schemas
• Facility/equipment inventory utilization as transactions and periodic snapshots

Healthcare Case Study and Bus Matrix

In the face of unprecedented consumer focus and governmental policy regulations, coupled with internal pressures, healthcare organizations need to leverage information more effectively to impact both patient outcomes and operational efficiencies. Healthcare organizations typically wrestle with many disparate systems to collect their clinical, financial, and operational performance metrics. This information needs to be better integrated to deliver more effective patient care, while concurrently ...