Building Clinical Data Warehouse for Traditional Chinese Medicine Knowledge Discovery

The clinical data from the daily clinical process, which keeps to traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) theories and principles, is the core empirical knowledge source for TCM researches. This paper introduces a data warehouse system, which is based on the structured electronic medical record system and daily clinical data, for TCM clinical researches and medical knowledge discovery. The system consists of several key components: clinical data schema, extraction-transformation-loading tool, online analytical analysis (OLAP) based on Business Objects (a commercial business intelligence software), and integrated data mining functionalities. Currently, the data warehouse contains 20,000 inpatient data of diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke, and more than 20,000 outpatient data. Moreover, we have developed several important research oriented subject analyses using OLAP, and conducted several TCM clinical data mining applications. The analysis applications show that the developed clinical data warehouse platform is promising to build the bridge for TCM clinical practice and theoretical research, hence, will promote the related TCM researches.