Organization of a clinical data warehouse

lit order to support the analysis of the process, qualify, outcomes, and cost of care delivered at a medical institution it is necessary an environment that integrates data from multiple clinical, administrative and financial systems This integration becomes essential to facilitate the access and retrieval of the variety of information In the context of health care, two approaches have emerged: the clinical data repository, which represents an integration of dispersed operational databases to assist clinical analyses of an individual, and the clinical data warehouse, which provides organizational principles that facilitate analyses of crossed patients' data We propose how to rapidly specify a clinical data warehouse taking into account the value chain of a health care institution and covering three different layers of data analysis. In order to assess our proposal, we have developed an environment called FBCDataWare with data warehouse and clinical data repository capabilities that has been validated at the Unit of Cardiology and Cardiovascular Surgery/Fundacao Bahiana de Cardiologia.