An emerging component of integrated computer systems. The data warehouse obtains data from one or more sources and makes it readily available for answering management questions about the organization and its activities. In the hospital, transactions such as patient billing, collecting insurance payments, giving services to patients, purchasing, and others are going on continuously, and access to this flowing stream of data “on-line” in order to obtain management information is awkward and costly. An “off-line” data warehouse system: (1) takes periodic (daily, weekly, monthly) “snapshots” of the computer records coming from these transactions, (2) retains only the data elements of each transaction which are needed for management information (to reduce the bulk of the data and speed the access to it), (3) formats the data in such a fashion that the data from different sources can be handled by the computer as though they were from a single source, (4) stores the data with an eye to ease of access, and (5) provides tools (computer systems) by which the data can be interrogated.
A central repository for the data collected by the various computer systems of an enterprise.