Construction of a Metadata Schema for Medical Data in Networking Applications

Abstract

Medical and health data are collected and stored in various document types and databases including clinical treatment records, medical examinations, prognosis health information, health billing and claims, health surveys, and community health settings. Such huge amount, wide range, and unstructured dataset characteristics imply a big challenge for researchers and government officers to analyze and make appropriate decisions on health policies. Both efficiency and effectiveness are constrained to the limitations of hardware devices and system software. Here we applied the Taiwanese government's medical databank as an example and proposed an efficient metadata schema for handling medical data through Internet applications. Based on the proposed method, the original complex and heterogeneous datasets could be transferred and encoded into several attributed data files and categorized in the domains of diagnosis, medication, surgical procedure, outpatient and hospitalization record, billing record, etc. We also illustrated superior performance of the proposed metadata mechanism by analyzing the comorbidity of major chronical diseases and hospitalization of diabetes patients in Taiwan through on-line analytical approach. The results show that primarily encoded metadata schema for categorizing and describing medical data could provide a possible solution for real-time Internet applications.