Representation and Organization of Health Information

Data must be represented and organized in ways that improve individual care and support databases designed to improve care delivery, reporting, and research. There are innumerable potential data sources, but discussed in this chapter are some of the most important data sources for healthcare. Clinical data include all of the locally stored, clinically relevant data. These include demographics as well as actual medical data. If a health information exchange is functioning, then data from that exchange may be included to a variable extent. Different applications require different ways of modeling and storing data. These tasks require trade-offs between computable data representations and less structured elements.