Clinical Data and Information Models

Definition

A formal representation of the clinical data using entities, types, relationships and attributes. The abstraction of clinical data into an information model enables reusability and extensibility of the database to satisfy different application needs and accommodate changes in the underlying data.

Key Points

The clinical domain is a data rich environment with multitude of different data entities ranging from several thousands of laboratory tests, procedures or medications that change often with new ones getting added almost every day. Furthermore these data are generated from different information systems or devices (often from different vendors) in the hospital. Integrating such wide variety of data streams into a common information model is a challenging task.

Most healthcare databases use generic information models [3, 4] such as event-component models with an Entity-Attribute-Value [5] (EAV) schema to represent the data (see Fig. 1). The advantage of using a generic...