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Development of a Clinical Data Warehouse for Hospital Infection Control

Affiliations of the authors: Department of Medicine, Cook County Hospital, Chicago, Illinois (MFW, PK, BMZ, RAW); Division of Healthcare Quality Promotion, National Center for Infectious Diseases, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia (WET); Department of Hospital Information Services, Cook County Bureau of Health Services, Chicago, Illinois (MS); Rush Medical College, Chicago, Illinois (RAW)

Correspondence and reprints: Mary Wisniewski, MSN, Division of Infectious Diseases, Cook County Hospital, 1901 West Harrison Street, Suite 124 Durand, Chicago, IL 60612; e-mail: <wise{at}aol.com>.

Received for publication: 11/27/02; accepted for publication: 04/19/03.

Existing data stored in a hospital's transactional servers have enormous potential to improve performance measurement and health care quality. Accessing, organizing, and using these data to support research and quality improvement projects are evolving challenges for hospital systems. The authors report development of a clinical data warehouse that they created by importing data from the information systems of three affiliated public hospitals. They describe their methodology; difficulties encountered; responses from administrators, computer specialists, and clinicians; and the steps taken to capture and store patient-level data. The authors provide examples of their use of the clinical data warehouse to monitor antimicrobial resistance, to measure antimicrobial use, to detect hospital-acquired bloodstream infections, to measure the cost of infections, and to detect antimicrobial prescribing errors. In addition, they estimate the amount of time and money saved and the increased precision achieved through the practical application of the data warehouse.

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