Clinical Data Repositories
Many health care organizations, particularly those moving toward electronic medical records, develop clinical data repositories. Although these databases can take different forms, in general the clinical data repository is a large database that gets data from various data stores within application systems across the organization. There is generally a process by which data are cleaned before they are moved from the source systems into the repository. Once the clean data are in the repository, they can be used to produce reports that integrate data from two or more data stores.