Meeting Health Care Research Needs in a Kimball Integrated Data Warehouse

Abstract

Business Intelligence and the Kimball methodology, often referred to as dimensional modelling, are well established in data warehousing as a successful means of turning data into information. These techniques have been utilized in multiple business areas such as banking, manufacturing, marketing, sales, healthcare and more. Several articles have also shown how the Kimball approach can and has been used in the development of clinical research databases. However, these articles have also shown that there are weaknesses to the Kimball methodology when applied to complex areas such as clinical research. This paper describes our approach to address these weaknesses and meet the more sophisticated needs of health researchers by leveraging relationships within the underlying data and advanced techniques in the Kimball methodology.