The Health Care field is data rich, but information poor. Data exists from admissions, laboratory, radiology, and pharmacy systems, as well as from third-party systems, which consolidate data from a variety of sources. However, for a number of reasons, these have remained “islands of information.” With the rise in implementation of clinical data repositories (one such repository is being built at the UIC Hospital), where transaction data is stored in a normalized relational format at the enterprise level, there is the promise of:

• Generating outcome information (e.g., that 2 additional days in Intensive Care Units results in fewer re-admissions of HIV patients with pneumocystis carinii pneumonia).
• Identifying treatment patterns by physician.
• Monitoring the health status of the community (e.g., the incidence and prevalence of disease, illness, traumatic injury) in order to project future utilization of services, and appropriateness of care across various settings (e.g., whether or not care in lower cost sites yields the same or better outcomes).