OBJECTIVES: As a result of recent technological developments, the ability to collect various kinds of data is growing rapidly. The Austrian health care system tries to respond to these trends by integrating a modern concept of data warehousing in order to support essential decisions. This constitutes a data-driven framework designed to provide decision makers with the required up-to-date information in a user-friendly form.

METHODS: A Data Warehouse (DWH) follows the paradigms of the Data Vault concept. Using a three- tier database architecture, the relevant data is loaded daily from different source systems and organized in a way that allows for long-term historical storage in a uniquely linked set of normalized tables; this design is consistent, flexible, scalable, adaptable to the needs of the health care system and ensures auditability and traceability of all data in the DWH. Finally, integration of business rules and presentation of the resulting information in star-schemas and interactive dashboards facilitates the visualization of real-time information at different levels of granularity and from various perspectives.

RESULTS: A DWH enables decision makers to monitor information about the health care system that go beyond the technical limitations of old-fashioned approaches. Data is loaded into the DWH automatically and in turn can be utilized by power users across departments and in different contexts. Due to historization, reports can be based on the latest data and any historical state of information can be reproduced at any time.Moreover, to ensure security, it is possible to implement user access permissions on various levels. Examples of successful applications include: 1) Rehab Map, 2) Rehab Utilization Monitoring, and 3) Long-term Rehab Effectiveness Monitoring.

CONCLUSIONS: Presently health care providers begin to use DWH to utilize the full potential of available information. This will allow management to plan, monitor, and evaluate their decisions with vastly improved speed, efficiency and data quality.