Information management in hospitals: an integrating approach

The need for integrating existing heterogeneous databases in a hospital to achieve operational efficiency, effectiveness in diagnostic decision making, cost economy, better risk management, and strategic planning in a competitive health care environment is addressed. Considering all aspects of a hospital´s information requirements, a virtual database integration approach is proposed for the database integration needed in a hospital. This approach will bring multiple databases into a logically integrated whole without causing much disruption to current hospital operations. This approach will also provide a high level of flexibility allowing for future system growth. Many technical, as well as behavioral, integration design issues particular to a hospital environment, such as those concerning integration planning, schema integration, mapping definition, and query processing schemes, are discussed