Disaster Response in Health Care: A Design Extension for Enterprise Data Warehouse

An Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) is developed to meet the needs of strategic decision making that operational data sources and systems such as online transaction processing (OLTP), by design, cannot support. In this article, we present an EDW architectural extension for the health care organizations so that they can continue providing high quality patient care during large-scale disasters. We develop this extension based on our study of the Veteran Health Administration’s (VHA) information technology (IT) systems and responses during Hurricane Katrina.