Date of Award

Fall 12-1-2010

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Information Systems (MSIS)

First Advisor

Stephen Krebsbach

Second Advisor

Mark Moran

Third Advisor

Ronghua Shan

Abstract

GE Healthcare is a worldwide leader in healthcare solutions. They are involved in almost every aspect of healthcare from medical devices to software solutions to assist physicians. One of their software solutions captures data from the medical devices and then uses that data to formulate procedural reports for the physician. This enables the physician to spend less time dictating and transcribing their findings and more time to see additional patients. One problem GE Healthcare is faced with is when hospitals become acquired by larger hospitals and both hospitals are running GE Healthcare solutions. The hospitals do not want to have to maintain two separate systems, but rather want them combined into one central system that can be accessed by all facilities. The data for these systems are stored in an Oracle database and there are no automated methods available to move the data from one database to another database. The databases use system generated identifiers to maintain the relationships between the data entities. This fact makes it very difficult to merge the data between two databases. The data cannot just be brought over from the source database into the destination database because the identifiers may already exist in the destination database. This requires that new identifiers be generated as the data is being brought over from the source database. This makes the processing of child tables very complex. The parent identifier of the child record needs to be synchronized with the new identifier of the parent entity. The complexity of this situation is compounded by the fact that a single record can point to multiple parent records and all these relationships will need to be maintained as the data is being brought over. This project will involve a user-interface (UI) that will allow users to specify the databases to be merged and give the users the option to specify the data elements to be included in the merge. There will also be an Oracle package and supporting schema that will actually perform the task of moving the data from the source database to the destination database. The system will have to be able to be ran multiple times and only bring over data that does not already exist in the destination database. The destination database will also need to be fully functional to other users of the system with no significant performance degradation.

Comments

dsu-th-244

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