Why Hospitals Need Data Warehouses and Real-Time Data Sharing

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This article reports on discussions from a conference titled 'Data léčí Česko' (Data Heals Czechia) held in Czechia, involving healthcare professionals and insurance representatives. There was a shared recognition that data is needed not just for clinical research, but as an active tool for improving quality and efficiency. Current hospital information systems often fail to link patient records reliably using a single identifier. This forces staff to manually extract and merge data (e.g., in Excel), making it difficult to track the full course of care, especially for chronic disease management or multi-provider journeys. The ideal solution requires real-time data collection. Two approaches are discussed: 1) Enriching administrative data sent to insurers by integrating clinical service records and insurance services (cost-effective). 2) Building a data warehouse that collects all clinical notes first, from which necessary information is then extracted and structured for specific analytical needs. Technically, the FHIR standard (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), an HL7 standard, was highlighted. FHIR is a format designed to exchange health data between systems, structuring data around individual clinical events linked by a patient identifier. This enhances interoperability, making quality measurement and improvement possible.