Oracle Data Warehouse is a safe but good choice for in-house clinical data warehouse
August 07, 2018
Oracle Data Warehouse is a safe but good choice for in-house clinical data warehouse
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Oracle Data Warehouse
My company is a non-profit organization of a healthcare system. We adopted Oracle Data Warehouse for building a clinical data warehouse, to support quality improvement and clinical research. Our hospitals and clinics run electronic health record systems that capture clinical data through patient care; the Data Warehouse is used to store them in a permanent manner. Once stored, the data can be normalized and standardized to be used by clinical departments, clinical champions, and researchers. There were a number of use cases in the Data Warehouse, but the major two were monitoring of clinical operation and improvement of clinical workflow.
- Oracle Data Warehouse is a well-known and already validated product. Its performance, technical support, documentation, online community, and sustainability is the best among the area.
- It is easy to find and hire good data developers, data architects, and analysts who specialize in Oracle Data Warehouse.
- It is easy to develop a financial plan based on the product, as its licensing is systematic. Also, the product's scalability is well developed with licensing policy and it makes it easier to flexibly plan budgets as we need more functionalities and services.
- It is very expensive product. But not to mention, there's good reasons why it is expensive.
- The product should support more cloud based services. When we made the decision to buy the product (which was 20 years ago,) there was no such thing to consider, but moving to a cloud based data warehouse may promise more scalability, agility, and cost reduction. The new version of Data Warehouse came out on the way, but it looks a bit behind compared to other competitors.
- Our healthcare data consists of 30% coded data (such as ICD 10 / SNOMED C,T) but the rests is narrative (such as clinical notes.). Oracle is the best for warehousing standardized data, but not a good choice when considering unstructured data, or a mix of the two.
- We built an enterprise analytics framework based on the Oracle Data Warehouse, which is a system-wide focus and coordination of people, processes, and technologies that ensures important data assets are leveraged. This led to better decision making, resulting in increased business and clinical value (better outcomes, lower costs, healthier people.)
- Through the framework, several benefits were presented quantitively or qualitatively: reduced variation in analytics practice, identification and elimination of duplicated efforts, and removal of unnecessary siloes in information within the enterprise.
- The Data Warehouse is well harmonized with advanced analytics tools in our organization such as visualization (Tableau, Cognos,) statistical tools (R, SAS, SPSS), and machine learning (Ayasdi).
Our organization adopted Oracle almost 20 years ago and there were a few options at that time. Oracle was the leading database tech company at that time and it was a safe choice to us. And they have been evolved and always ahead of new technologies, high performance, and professional business support. We didn't find a good reason to replace Oracle with any other competitors.