Introduction
The healthcare sector must deal with the difficulty of managing massive amounts of sensitive and complicated data. Traditional database management tools have failed to meet the specific requirements of the healthcare industry, leading to inefficiencies and even threats to patient safety. This article argues that the healthcare industry would benefit from the creation of specialized databases because they would enhance data management, patient outcomes, and overall efficiency. This argument will be supported by a number of sources.
Problems with Traditional Healthcare Databases
The healthcare industry generates a wide variety of data, some of which is structured, some of which is semi-structured, and some of which is completely unstructured (Mehta & Pandit, 2018). This complexity is often too much for traditional databases to handle, leading to inaccuracies or missing information that can have a negative effect on patient care.
Protecting the privacy and security of patients’ personal information is a top priority in the healthcare industry, as evidenced by the prevalence of stringent regulations like HIPAA (Kruse, Smith, Vanderlinden, & Nealand, 2017). Traditional databases may not have the safety measures in place to continue to comply with these regulations, which could compromise patient confidentiality.
Performance and scalability: In times of public health emergency, healthcare systems need databases that can quickly expand to meet the increased demand. The inability of traditional databases to scale can cause bottlenecks in the system and lower overall performance (Kaur & Rani, 2015).
The Value of Healthcare-Related Data Warehouses
Gains in Data Management Accurate and efficient data storage and retrieval are made possible by healthcare-specific databases that are built to deal with the complexity of healthcare data (Mehta & Pandit, 2018). Better clinical decision-making and care for patients are possible outcomes of better data management.
The encryption, access controls, and auditing capabilities of healthcare-specific databases can help ensure compliance with industry standards for data security (Kruse et al., 2017). These databases aid healthcare providers in meeting their compliance obligations and protecting patients’ data by enforcing strict security measures.
Databases designed specifically for healthcare can be scaled up or down quickly to meet the fluctuating demands of the industry, improving both scalability and performance (Kaur & Rani, 2015). Because of this increased scalability, system efficiency is likely to increase and bottlenecks are less likely to occur.
Databases geared toward the healthcare industry
In response to the difficulties encountered by the healthcare sector, several specialized databases have been created. Some instances are:
The OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) was developed by the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) to standardize the organization, storage, retrieval, and analysis of healthcare data (Hripcsak et al., 2015).
Supporting clinical research by providing a framework for managing complex healthcare data such as patient records, clinical trial results, and genomic data, i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside) is a healthcare-specific database (Murphy et al., 2010).
Conclusion
In order to meet the healthcare industry’s specific challenges, the creation of healthcare-specific databases is crucial. These databases have the potential to enhance patient care and system efficiency through better data management, security, and scalability. Healthcare providers can better leverage technology to meet the needs of their patients and stay in compliance with industry regulations if they invest in healthcare-specific databases.
References
Hripcsak, G., Duke, J. D., Shah, N. H., Reich, C. G., Huser, V., Schuemie, M. J., … & Ryan, P. B. (2015). Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) for a Crossover World: Unlocking the Potential of Real-World Evidence. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 22(4), 707-710.
Kaur, K., & Rani, R. (2015). Modeling and querying data in NoSQL databases. In 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (Big Data) (pp. 1313-1318). IEEE.
Kruse, C. S., Smith, B., Vanderlinden, H., & Nealand, A. (2017). Security techniques for the electronic health records. Journal of Medical Systems, 41(8), 127.
Mehta, N., & Pandit, A. (2018). Concurrence of big data analytics and healthcare: A systematic review. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 114, 57-65.
Murphy, S. N., Weber, G., Mendis, M., Gainer, V., Chueh, H. C., Churchill, S., & Kohane, I. (2010). Serving the enterprise and beyond with informatics for integrating biology and the bedside (i2b2). Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 17(2), 124-130.