The Enterprise Data Trust at Mayo Clinic: a semantically integrated warehouse of biomedical data

Abstract

Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Data Trust is a collection of data from patient care, education, research, and administrative transactional systems, organized to support information retrieval, business intelligence, and high-level decision making. Structurally it is a top-down, subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant, and non-volatile collection of data in support of Mayo Clinic's analytic and decision-making processes. It is an interconnected piece of Mayo Clinic's Enterprise Information Management initiative, which also includes Data Governance, Enterprise Data Modeling, the Enterprise Vocabulary System, and Metadata Management. These resources enable unprecedented organization of enterprise information about patient, genomic, and research data. While facile access for cohort definition or aggregate retrieval is supported, a high level of security, retrieval audit, and user authentication ensures privacy, confidentiality, and respect for the trust imparted by our patients for the respectful use of information about their conditions.

Figure 1

Data integration proceeds from left to right. Leftmost are the primary data sources, including the EMR environments for each major campus (not shown are the multitude of departmental data system feeds such as laboratories). Moving right, the data are integrated into staging and replication services, with further refinement (and rightward movement) into normalized versions of the information (‘Atomic Layer’, ‘Living Database’) which are dependent upon Master Data (standards). The right-most full column are the various presentation of data derivatives (subsets) to users, applications, and systems. The free-standing objects on the extreme right are support and development technical environments that support the maintenance and refinement of the overarching Enterprise Data Trust. Dotted lines indicate ‘short cuts’ in the data curation process, where some information is transformed directly to project-specific data marts. BO, business objects; EAV, entity, attribute, value; ODS, operational data store.