Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Aug 9, 2022
Date Accepted: May 3, 2023
Using a Clinical Data Warehouse to calculate and present key metrics for radiology departments: Implementation and Performance Evaluation
ABSTRACT
Background:
Due to the importance of radiologic examinations like X-rays or computed tomography scans for many clinical diagnoses, an optimal utilization of the radiology department is one of the primary goals of many hospitals.
Objective:
To calculate key metrics about this utilization a radiology data warehouse solution should be created, where data from radiology information systems could be imported and then queried using a query language as well as a graphical user interface.
Methods:
Using a simple configuration file, the developed system allows for the processing of radiology data exported from any kind of radiology information system into an Excel or a CSV file. This data is then imported into a clinical data warehouse. Additional values based on the radiology data could be calculated during this import process by implementing one of several provided interfaces. Afterwards the query language and the graphical user interface of the data warehouse could be used to configure and calculate reports on this data. For the most common types of requested reports a web interface has been created, to view their numbers as graphics.
Results:
The tool has been successfully tested with the data of four different German hospitals from 2018 to 2021 with a total of 1,436,111 examinations. The initial processing of the radiology data for using it with the clinical data warehouse took (depending on the amount of data provided by each hospital) between 7min and 1h 11min. Calculating three reports of different complexities on the data of each hospital has been possible in 1 to 3 seconds for reports with up to 200 individual calculations and in up to 1.5 minutes for reports with up to 8,200 individual calculations.
Conclusions:
A system has been developed, which has its main advantage in being generic concerning the export of different radiology information systems as well as concerning the configuration of queries for various reports. The queries could be configured easily using the graphical interface of the data warehouse and their results could be exported into the standard formats Excel and CSV for further processing.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.