Hanging the meat on the bones (the search for better organized data)

Posted 21 June, 2007 in future tech

Thankfully, many hospitals and physicians are beginning to store their medical data into electronic medical records system which, in turn, use a relational database such as Oracle or MSSQL. Relational databases are powerful tools because they provide fast access to non-redundant, consistent data.

And the real advantage of all that data is the promise of data aggregation: being able to extract useful information over a range of different databases in difference practices. Relational databases alone, however, fall short when you’re trying to integrate disparate systems. The problem is the lack of a structure of meaning (what researchers call an “ontology”) which ties data together in meaningful relationships and then back to a universal set of medical terminology and hierarchy. When a carefully constructed ontology is employed, particular information can be combined with other matching pieces of information.

The data (meat) alone is useful, but when combined with an agreed-upon structure (bones), suddenly we begin to have real possibilities for integration and collaboration.