فهرست مطالب نادر میرانی

Data and information resources are scattered in health care institutions and health systems and integrated access to them for reporting and analysis is challenging. Application of data warehouse can be a solution to this issue. Thus, this study aimed to investigate data warehouse applications in the field of health, identify its challenges, and provide solutions.
This was a comprehensive and narrative review study. First, the keywords in the field of data warehouse were determined and the extent of the search was limited to the filed of health. Than, the relevant articles were selected from Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus, Web of Knowledge, and ScienceDirect databases.
Findings: Today, most health care institutions face the challenge of collecting, organizing, and retrieving disparate and bulky data for research, quality improvement, outcome analysis, or best practices determination. The solution to most of these challenges is data warehouse. This technique may resolve many problems in data management and utilization of health system data.
The use of systems such as data warehouse is the main objective of the health system for the prevention of the onset or progression of diseases and improvement of public health. This paper was a first step in creating and using the National Health Data Warehouse, and thus, requires a national approach to address its challenges and solutions.

The development and the adoption of electronic health records may face a number of barriers. These barriers can be classified as technical، organizational، individual، financial and ethico-legal. This study aimed at determining the importance of each of the mentioned barriers in the development and adoption of the electronic health records from the perspectives of the experts in the Ministry of Health. This was a descriptive applied research completed in 2011. The study population were constituted the faculty members working in of the departments of health information technology، health information management، and medical informatics، and as well as those who were in charge of the development and adoption of the electronic health records in the Ministry of Health and Medical Education. In this study، no No sampling method was used due to the limited number of the study population. Data were collected using a Likert scale questionnaire and were analysed by means of descriptive statistics. The content and face validity of the questionnaire were established and the reliability was calculated using Cronbach’s alpha. In total، 32 participants (51. 6%) completed the questionnaire. The participants'' perspectives showed that the most important barriers in the development and adoption of electronic health records were the technical barriers (mean=71. 00). The financial barriers and the ethico-legal barriers with the mean values of 70. 05 and 68. 16 were in the second and third place، respectively. The individual and organisational barriers with the mean values of 64. 84 and 62. 67 were in the fourth and fifth places. It seems that employing a team of experts in different areas related to the development and adoption of EHR، training users، and addressing technical concerns along with allocating financial resources can help overcome barriers to the adoption of EHR.