Abstract

Hospitals aim to improve quality of care and ensure cost effectiveness in the health care services they provide. To achieve these goals, hospitals are increasingly building data warehouses where they collect data related to their business processes in order to monitor and analyze their processes for providing health care. However, such data often includes information of a sensitive nature which means that the design of access mechanisms and interfaces must comply with ethical guidelines and privacy legislation. Indeed, to protect privacy and confidentiality, various legislations and laws have been established which hospitals have to comply with. This paper describes a case study at a large teaching hospital in which a systematic approach to designing on-line access to data warehouses has been investigated and prototyped that addresses the issues of both privacy compliance and effective performance management. The design approach leverages explicitly modeled links to legal documentation, business processes, and dimensionally modeled data marts from within a framework of requirements models built using User Requirements Notation (URN). Preliminary results from the case study indicate that the approach shows promise for integrating privacy compliance and performance management into the design of health care systems.

-- Daniel Amyot - 22 Jun 2007

Discussion

• Paper available at http://ijg.cgpublisher.com/product/pub.154/prod.29 or from the authors.
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