Steps to successful data warehousing for Telehealth/Telemedicine

Today, it is no longer a question of whether or not to build a data warehouse, but how to build it for success. Besides wanting to have a successful implementation, competitive forces are creating the need to have such systems in place quickly. Data warehousing is not about the hardware, or the software, or the front-end application. It is not about standards, or "speeds and feeds". While all those questions will eventually need to be explored they are not the primary focus. First and foremost, data warehousing is about giving people who make decisions the access to the data they need in a flexible and timely manner in order to increase value. Within Telehealth/Telemedicine, data warehousing has become an active, integral part of the patient treatment process especially with the advent of the Internet. An example of an active data warehouse for Telehealth/Telemedicine is The National Medical Knowledge Data Bank.