A framework for medical and health care databases and data warehouses conceptual modeling support

To improve their knowledge of diseases, physicians need to study and learn from their patients and from their related medical records. Physicians continue to initiate this learning process by taking into account the history of the patient’s medical problems and physical examination findings in the patient’s medical record, which illustrates the importance of medical and health care databases. In other side, the evolution of medical data volume needs to be modeled using data warehouses. A medical data warehouse is a particular database targeted toward decision support. It takes data from various medical databases and other data sources and transforms it into new structures that fit better for the task of performing the decision making. For this reason, the medical database and data warehouse models needed to produce a formal description, a conceptual schema of all the data generated in medical and health care institutions, and how all of the data were related. However, it is still difficult to find references models, since classical conceptual modeling does not incorporate the specificity of the medical field. The design phase is the most important activity in the successful building of a database and a data warehouse. To address these shortcomings, this paper proposes a new modeling framework based on an UML profile, called medical profile. This profile was proposed to standardize the task of medical data modeling, using the Unified Modeling Language (UML) extensibility mechanisms. Our proposal is aligned with model driven architecture (MDA), thus permitting to define and clarify all concepts and elements related to medical field including the medical image annotation process. To show the benefits of our profile, we develop an example related to the medical image annotation process. Finally, we also need to verify whether our framework is considered by the specialists as a potential aid. We evaluate our framework impact by inquiring the specialists about the degree of confidence in our framework. By analyzing the obtained results, we can argue that the proposed framework presented a high acceptance regarding the specialists’ interests.