Generic database design for patient management information.

Patient management information tracks general facts about the location of the patient and the providers assigned to care for the patient. The Clinical Data Repository at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center employs a generic schema to record patient management events. The schema is extremely simple, yet can support several different views of patient information, as required by different applications: a longitudinal view of patient visits, including both inpatient and outpatient encounters; a visit-oriented view, to record facts related to a current encounter; a location-based view to provide a census of a nursing ward; and a provider-based view to give a list of the patients currently being cared for by a given clinician. All of these views can be supported in a highly efficient manner by the use of appropriate indexes.