Design and Implementation of a Data Warehouse for Benchmarking in Clinical Rehabilitation

Clinical Benchmarking provides comparative analysis among healthcare institutions in order to improve their quality and efficiency. This paper describes the development and implementation of a Data Warehouse, following Kimball's Business Dimensional Lifecycle framework, to support a dynamic Decision Support System for Benchmarking in Clinical Rehabilitation. For the Data Warehouse development, the identification of the most important concepts as well as the data modeling process are the most challenging and important tasks, requiring deep knowledge on the subjects in matter. Consequently, the developed Data Warehouse respects the specific characteristics related with Clinical Rehabilitation, addressed through a data modeling process using different Data Marts for each of the major business requirements. The evaluation of the solution, using real clinical records, demonstrated a clear orientation and suitability to the subject in matter as well as the capability to provide accurate current and historical analysis.