OBJECTIVES: In order to support rational decisions in the Austrian health care system, decision makers require real-time information of high quality in a user-friendly form. Commonly, the sources of information are distributed across various old-fashioned database systems which are approaching their technical limits in terms of storage and processing efficiency. To address future challenges and achieve consolidation of different source systems, a modern concept of data warehouse (DWH) architecture is being implemented.

METHODS: The DWH architecture follows the paradigms of Data Vault. Firstly, data from multiple source systems are loaded daily into the DWH to keep track of all changes. Then, a full history of data changes is established and stored in a flexible linked set of normalized tables. Subsequently, data are transformed into information by applying business rules. Finally, the information is put into context and presented in dashbords at different levels of granularity and from various perspectives.

RESULTS: Successful DWH-applications in the context of rehabilitation are as follows: 1) Rehabilitation planning: A Rehab Map that provides insights about existing and proposed rehabilitation facilities. The benefit of the map lies in collecting information from three different data sources: rehabilitation, geospatial, and population data. 2) Rehabilitation Utilization Monitoring: An interactive dashboard for assessing ongoing rehabilitations. Results can be evaluated e.g. by scrutinizing specific aspects such as diagnosis, age or facilities. The information is provided by the DWH automatically on a monthly basis.3) Long-term Rehabilitation Effectiveness Monitoring: A platform for effectively auditing the success of completed rehabilitation measures. This makes use of the capacity of the DWH to supply a historization of relevant information both before and after the rehabilitation treatment.

CONCLUSIONS: DWH has been integrated in order to overcome limitations of old-fashioned systems. This in turn allows management better to plan, monitor, and evaluate their decisions with improved speed, efficiency and information quality.