Designing a database, especially those involving complex data, is not an easy task. One must first have a good understanding of the problem and the relationships among the entities of a given database problem before he can design a database that captures the real situation. One of the most common mistakes in database design is directly trying to design the database without conducting first a thorough background study of the case at hand.
Martin Robbin and Alice Bobbin (1989) advices that to be able to design a good database from a set of complex data, the database should be designed such that it conforms to the channel of measurement.
This means that the semantic principles that were the basis for generating the data must be always preserved. Likewise, the entities of the database must have the capability to receive additional attributes and must be capable of reorganization data. In addition, data must also be the capability to be preserved and has to be reversible. An example would be that birth data are transformable to century notation and vice versa.
In the field of Health Information Systems, the design of RDBMS is not simple because of the complexity of data surrounding the health information systems. Some major challenges that health information often face is how to keep an accurate, reliable and secure electronic health records. Likewise, how to come-up with a well-designed database is one of the major challenges they are facing. Implementing RDBMS has a lot of potential for the healthcare industry like the ability to track a patient’s records and critical indicator’s and to interconnect these to multiple other information facilities in the healthcare industry. Another major issue health care professional face when designing healthcare databases is how to keep the confidentiality of a patient’s records. This can be resolved by controlling the views of each of the users of a specific database.
References:
Canpbell, Robert (2004). Database Design: What HIM Professionals Need to Know. Retrieved from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2047327/
David, M.H. and Robbin, A. (1989). Database Design for Large-Scale Complex Data. Retrieved from http://www2.census.gov/prod2/sipp/wp/SIPP_WP_100.pdf
