Corporate Data Warehouse
Central to the development of SHIS and SHIS-R is the NHSScotland Corporate Data Warehouse (CDW).
What is a data warehouse?
A data warehouse is a database specifically designed to support analysis and reporting. A data warehouse typically consists of multiple data marts, each of which represents a functional area e.g. acute, prescribing, workforce.
NHSScotland Corporate Data Warehouse
NHS National Services Scotland (NSS) developed a data warehouse and reporting infrastructure to support information management. This NHSScotland Corporate Data Warehouse now contains a wide range different data marts for organisations across NHSScotland. The NHSScotland CDW is 'dimensional' data warehouse. This means that within each data mart, data are partitioned into 'facts' or 'dimensions'. Facts are normally numeric information whereas dimensions are the reference information that gives context to the facts (see Common Dimensions for further information). The NHSScotland CDW has been developed in Oracle, and users access the data using BusinessObjects (BO). Currently, users access the data using the XI version of BO (BOXI).
Some of the data marts within this form the Scottish Health Information Service (SHIS). The data marts within SHIS are managed by ISD Scotland.
