| Proceedings of the 33rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences- 2000 Database Description for a Pan-European Healthcare System (2008) | |||||||||||||||
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| In the future, many institutions from countries distributed throughout Europe will be expected to collaborate to provide patient healthcare information in which petabytes of data must be stored. With increasing complexity of the organisation, data and functions of healthcare organisations, information systems need to be increasingly flexible and extensible, intuitive to navigate around and to be interoperable with existing legacy systems. The integration of these hirtherto ‘islands of information’, is heavily dependent on the flexibility and accessibility of the data model describing the healthcare enterprise’s repository Making the model description-driven ensures that knowledge about the repository structure is available for applications to interrogate for the extraction of application-specific data. In this paper a large-scale distributed scientific data collection and management system is described. It is postulated that adopting a description-driven philosophy to repository design could provide the functionality required by next generation paneuropean healthcare systems. 1. Pan-European Healthcare and Informatics for the Future The accumulation of massive volumes of clinical and laboratory data, along with the growing body of knowledge and experience in human medicine, provides the basis not only for the effective treatment of diseases, but also a major transition away from treating episodic health problems to promoting health. Thus, if we can be said to have the basic knowledge, the question we address is the technology to realise these theoretical possibilities. The emphasis on evidence-based practice in medicine is a matter of good health as well as good economics. With a degree of variability in the data which masks any inferences that can be drawn, the | |||||||||||||||
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