Enabling flexible integration of healthcare information using the entity-attribute-value storage model

Area of Science:

• Health Informatics
• Data Management

Background:

• Inefficient paper-based systems and system heterogeneity hinder healthcare communication.
• Digital patient care records are crucial for integrating health information.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a digital patient care record system.
• To establish a foundation for integrated healthcare information.

Main Methods:

• Developed a generic storage structure using the entity-attribute-value (EAV) model.
• Ensured data compactness, flexibility, and robustness for the digital patient record.
• Implemented direct data storage without information loss.

Main Results:

• Performance tests evaluated connection, query execution, and result set traversal times.
• Query execution time was found to be the lowest.
• Result traversal time demonstrated a dependency on the number of documents.

Conclusions:

• The EAV-based approach offers flexibility for evolving healthcare standards and knowledge.
• Enables compact storage of highly sparse data.
• Facilitates efficient import and export of standardized healthcare reports.