The University of North Carolina Health Care is partnering with IBM to create a data warehouse designed to help speed the development of new treatments for diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis and cancer.

The Carolina Data Warehouse for Health (CDW-H), which is built on IBM software and hardware, allows medical researches to analyze large amounts of patient data and uncover trends in seconds. The data warehouse is in production with a secure Web portal that provides access to anatomized cohort query selection, diabetes and inpatient data marts, business intelligence reports and analytics applications and supporting clinical translation research.

“With the deployment of the Carolina Data Warehouse for Health, we have been able to increase the timeliness of the information available to our researchers, staff and physicians,” said Donald Spencer, MD, associate director of medical informatics at UNCHC. “Because the system can also support general queries that relate to the diagnosis and treatment of a wide array of patients, we are now able to make more intelligent decisions leading to improved patient care.”

The CDW-H project is currently focused on three major subject areas:

• Cohort Selection – primary users are researchers who need to determine cohort availability for studies, grants, clinical trial recruitment using de-identified (all personal information removed) data.
• Diabetes Data Mart – primary users are clinicians and analysts in the practice area. They use the data mart to gain access to information and statistics on diabetics and pre-diabetics for disease management, performance reporting and analysis.
• Inpatient Data Mart – primarily used by the Quality Improvement Office and hospital analysts to support performance improvement efforts, core measures reporting and hospital patient population studies/analysis.

“This new data warehouse will allow healthcare professionals to work more intelligently, speeding the development of treatments for disease,” said Dan Pelino, general manager of global healthcare and life sciences for IBM. “Sharing data on this scale heralds a new era of healthcare, where coordinated, patient-centered care and an adherence to evidence-based medicine can improve the quality of care delivered to people around the world.”