Data mining goes multidimensional

The success of a healthcare organization depends on its ability to acquire, store, analyze and compare data across many parts of the enterprise, by many individuals. While relational databases have been around since the 1970s, their two-dimensional structure has limited--or made impossible--the kind of cross-dimensional trend analysis so necessary to healthcare today. Enter online analytical processing (OLAP), in which servers store data in multiple dimensions, opening a world of opportunity for data-mining across the enterprise. In this issue of HEALTHCARE INFORMATICS, we feature our first report from the National Software Testing Laboratories (NSTL) about technologies that will change the way healthcare does business. A division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, NSTL is an independent software and hardware testing lab offering services that include compatibility testing, bug testing, comparison testing, documentation evaluation and usability.