Hospital discharge transactions: a data warehouse component

The Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (CATCH) methodology, under development at the University of South Florida, provides a systematic framework for community level assessment that can be a valuable tool for resource allocation and healthcare policy formulation. The community-level focus employers local decision-makers and provides a clear methodology for organizing and interpreting the data. The CATCH methodology has been successfully used to produce many community reports, but each application requires time consuming data collection and analysis activities. A data warehouse is being constructed to support the current methodology as well as future initiatives. This paper reports on some aspects of this on-going data warehouse project, focusing on hospital discharge data. This data is used to derive a set of CATCH indicators, but is also a powerful data warehouse component itself. The paper describes the design and development of a transaction oriented data warehouse component, based on hospital discharge data.