Interactively visualizing data warehouses.

As healthcare costs continue to rise, along with the urgency to control these costs, timely analyses of operational data stored in data warehouses have become critical. Although healthcare organizations have begun to amass large volumes of raw data within data warehouses, many have yet to capitalize on that valuable information. Many clinical and financial events are recorded each day, yet few of these data are leveraged to increase organizational awareness and performance. Because the development and implementation of a data warehouse requires significant time and capital, as well as highly skilled labor, the need to more fully leverage this considerable investment demands techniques that facilitate detailed data exploration, analysis, and the subsequent communication of findings. This article describes how the effective display of complex relationships in data can be used to discover areas of variance in large, changing data warehouses.