There’s no denying that medical databases play an integral role in the healthcare industry. From improving patient care to advancing medical research, these databases serve as the foundation for a wide range of important functions within the healthcare industry.
In this blog post, we will probe into the types of databases used in healthcare, ranging from primary and secondary databases to critical care and emergency healthcare databases.
Primary and Secondary Databases
Primary Healthcare Databases
Databases serve as the backbone of the medical industry, especially in healthcare. Primary healthcare databases are built directly by healthcare organizations. These databases play a key role in storing information related to diseases, diagnoses, treatments, medications, and various medical practices. Accuracy and organization are paramount when it comes to primary healthcare databases, as they form the foundation for providing accurate and timely healthcare services to patients.
Secondary Healthcare Databases
Healthcare organizations also rely on secondary databases, which consist of clinical information sourced from various entities such as hospitals, clinics, physician groups, and insurance companies. These databases integrate data for specific purposes, making it easily accessible to users. They provide a broader spectrum of information, facilitating in-depth analysis and comprehensive insights into medical practices and patient care.
Also read: Why healthcare organizations move from Microsoft Access databases to custom database and management systems.
Critical Care and Emergency Healthcare Databases
Databases in Intensive Care Units
Given the critical nature of intensive care units, databases within these settings are important for accurate and timely patient care. Technological advancements have made these databases more technologically advanced and complex, aiding in the careful and accurate analysis required for the complex cases seen in ICU environments. These databases store imperative data on diseases, treatments, medications, and medical practices to ensure effective patient management.
Emergency Room Data Management
Units within emergency healthcare grounds rely heavily on databases to provide required patient information quickly and efficiently. For instance, in emergency room data management, quick access to patients’ basic information, such as name, address, and medication, is compulsory for immediate care decisions.
Clinical Information Database
Unlike other types of healthcare databases, the Clinical Information Database provides information necessary for patient evaluation and treatment decisions. This database contains all the data that doctors require to assess a patient’s condition, including hospital departments, physicians, nurses, technicians, emergency personnel and any other relevant personnel.
Patient Evaluation and Treatment Decisions
Decisions regarding patient evaluation and treatment are based on the comprehensive data stored in the Clinical Information Database. From medical history and diagnostic test results to previous treatments and medications, this database ensures that healthcare professionals have access to accurate and up-to-date information to make decisions regarding a patient’s care.
Integration with Hospital Department Databases
Hospital department databases are interconnected with the Clinical Information Database to ensure seamless access to a patient’s complete medical records. This integration allows healthcare providers from different departments, such as emergency care, radiology, and pathology, to access the necessary data efficiently and effectively.
This integration facilitates a more comprehensive approach to patient care, enabling healthcare professionals to collaborate and coordinate treatment plans based on the holistic view of a patient’s medical history and current condition.
Healthcare institutions should focus on integrated healthcare databases and consult with healthcare database experts.
Mortality and Morbidity Databases
Tracking Statistics in Healthcare
Keeping track of statistics in healthcare is necessary for understanding trends in disease prevalence, treatment outcomes, and patient care. Mortality and morbidity databases play a key role in capturing important data related to patient deaths and long-term illnesses. These databases help healthcare providers identify areas of improvement in their practices and develop strategies to enhance patient care.
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs)
Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) have become essential tools for healthcare providers in modern practice management. EMRs allow doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals to access comprehensive patient health information digitally easily. This data includes medical histories, diagnoses, treatment plans, prescription records, lab and test results, immunization dates, vital signs, allergies, and more.
By storing all patient data electronically, EMRs enable more efficient clinical workflows. Doctors can review a patient’s records with a few clicks rather than sifting through paper files.
An example of how EMRs enhance care is managing chronic conditions like diabetes. Rather than trying to piece together information from various paper sources, a physician can pull up a diabetic patient’s EMR and instantly see their medication list, blood sugar readings over time, nutrition counselling notes, retinal exam dates, and other critical details.
Database Management Systems Types in Healthcare
Hierarchical Database
Hierarchical databases are a good way to organize connected health information into a layered tree form. At the top is the whole hospital. Below that are sections for different doctor specialties like heart doctors, cancer doctors, and pediatricians; these sections are split into subtitles with patient files grouped by illness. For example, in cardiology, there may be groups for heart disease types like clogged arteries, problems at birth with the heart, and abnormal heartbeats. If you keep drilling down, you find each person’s electronic medical record.
It has their medical history, diagnoses, treatments, and how they responded to care. This ordered setup makes it easy to find one person’s whole health story from top to bottom. It also helps add up anonymous outcome statistics as you go up the levels. Because of this family-like association between records, the system is good at managing individual care and learning trends in big patient populations.
Network Database
In big hospitals, a network database works well. It has a business server that talks to a website holding all the info. The EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) moves data between the business server and the website. The website then shows the data to doctors, nurses and staff through their web browsers.
This network database is helpful because clinicians can access patient records right away from any computer. They don’t have to search through files or wait to see what they need. Plus, the network database keeps duplicate copies of everything on different hard drives. So if one drive stops working, all the important health records are still safe. It also uses transactions to make sure nobody accidentally changes or deletes anything when working.
This keeps patient data protected no matter who looks at it. With a network set up, the whole hospital can quickly see test results, change medical orders or check medicine lists to give people the best care whenever and wherever it’s needed.
Relational Database
A Relational database management system allows users to easily manage organizations’ databases. By selecting a user interface that best suits their need, users can access and update information from remote sites, even if they are situated thousands of miles away.
Relational databases are extremely useful for storing information about individuals, such as their full names, addresses, telephone numbers, and birth dates. They are also used for storing customer information, such as buying orders and credit card details. In addition, these databases can maintain records of employees’ histories and skills, aiding in selecting the right candidate for a specific position.
In the government sector, relational databases are utilized to keep records of citizens, marriages, births, and deaths. These databases play a key role in maintaining information and ensuring data integrity.
One of the key advantages of Relational databases is their ability to save time and money due to their efficient organization of large amounts of data.
Object Oriented Database
Object-oriented databases work differently than traditional databases. These databases represent real things like patients, doctors, and medical tests as “objects”.” Similar to how objects are used in programming, these objects have details about themselves along with actions they can perform. Relationships between objects are defined by how they are connected rather than forcing them into tables.
This provides hospitals more flexibility in designing databases that match their operations. For example, a patient object may contain name, age and medical history.
A doctor’s object holds their specialty. Test objects link patients to results. This allows connections like “Mr. Smith sees Dr. Johnson and needs a blood test before treatment” to be easily represented. Rather than separating data over multiple tables, it mimics how these real people and tasks are related in hospitals.
This type of database makes it simpler for healthcare providers to organize complex patient information and care processes compared to standard databases that separate everything into tables and fields. Object-oriented design brings databases closer to mirroring the real world.
ER Model Database
ER model databases are designed to represent how data is connected in the real world. Unlike other databases, which separate everything into rigid tables, ER models store information in a branching structure.
For example, a hospital could set up departments like cardiology as branches in their ER model database. Under each department, they could add child branches for doctors and rooms. Patient records may then branch off to individual doctors to link medical histories and tests. This kind of setup easily shows relations like “John being treated by Smith in room 202 under cardiology.”
As new connections form, like a patient seeing another doctor or a test result coming in, the database can adjust on its own instead of needing table changes. Most important entities have their own branches, and linking branches illustrate the relations between people and events over time. This branching structure reflects how real healthcare systems work with complex, interconnected patient data.
Traditional databases struggle to naturally represent the nested nature found in domains like healthcare. By incorporating branches and child branches, ER modelling allows flexible yet intuitive organization of information as it occurs in practice versus rigid separation into tables.
NoSQL Databases
NoSQL databases store information in a more flexible way than traditional databases. Instead of fitting data into fixed tables, NoSQL systems keep related facts together as documents, key-values or graphs.
A social media site using a standard database may need different tables for posts, profiles, likes and comments. Entering a new post requires inputting into multiple linked tables. With NoSQL, the site could hold each post as a document with all the details, removing the need for joins across tables.
Documents flexibly contain varied data types, too. A post may include text, links, hashtags, and images together within its record. Interactions like likes and shares would link simply through unique identifiers, not a separate join table.
As the site grows, an SQL database requires more servers to split the workload across smaller tables using queries. NoSQL distributes documents across numerous inexpensive servers that scale linearly. Updating a post affects only its document, not linked records in multiple machines.
By keeping related information bundled instead of separated, NoSQL provides a more straightforward structure than SQL for complex, dynamic information like social networks handling big data volumes.
Bottom Line
Healthcare relies heavily on sophisticated databases to efficiently and securely manage extensive amounts of critical patient data.
From electronic medical records to mortality tracking, databases are integral to delivering high-quality care and advancing medical understanding.
However, selecting and maintaining the appropriate database platform requires specialized expertise. If your healthcare organization requires assistance developing, implementing or optimizing complex databases suited to your unique needs, contact us about our database management and development services for the healthcare industry.
Our team of medical professionals and database specialists can ensure you have integrated, scalable solutions to store and analyze data in ways that improve everything from administrative workflows to patient outcomes.
