Building a data warehouse for infection control

Recently, the convergence of several themes in health care has stimulated interest in exploiting data collected during clinical encounters to monitor and improve the quality of health care. Infection control departments can be supported by assembling previously collected electronic data into a data warehouse to monitor infections, report communicable diseases, and detect clusters of organisms. I present the rationale for constructing a data warehouse and describe the steps and challenges of developing a data warehouse to support infection control activities.