The e-Baby data warehouse: a case study

Neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) require equipment and facilities to assist and monitor premature (and some full-term) babies. This equipment outputs physiological and clinical data, but current research does not provide doctors with techniques for capturing this data in a format that is suitable for analysis and research. Additionally, regional hospitals provide limited NICU support, but, without access to a neonatologist, the baby must be moved to another hospital. This paper details a framework for clinical and physiological data capture, the storage structures within the e-Baby data warehouse, and information access through a secure intranet/Internet browser. The key contribution of this work is the infrastructure that provides a platform for patient information data capture, storage, display and analysis. A key benefit of this work is to provide a mechanism for neonatologists to receive information directly from a regional hospital, thereby preventing, in some cases, the immediate need to move the baby.