INTRODUCTION-WHAT IS A DATA MART?A data mart is a collection of data in a custom format in a data warehouse focused on a specific report or functional area such as census of a hospital, hospital billing activity, labor and delivery outcomes or nursing care quality measures. (Oracle, 2012) Data marts are typically built by the information services department or an EHR vendor. Data marts typically pull data from multiple sources. These data sources can be internal systems used by business units or external sources. The internal source does not always have to be an internal operating system; it could be another internal data warehouse. The data contained in a data mart is focused on a single topic, can vary in size and complexity, although it is limited in scope. (Oracle, 2012) Data marts are classified into two categories. Dependent data marts pull data from a central data warehouse, sometimes called an enterprise data warehouse, while independent data marts pull data from operational systems or external sources. For the purposes of this presentation, we promote the use of dependent data marts because the benefits of the extract, transform, and load (ETL) process are very similar in that the data is already clean, summarized, and loaded into the data. warehouse. The ETL process mainly involves identifying the subset of relevant data and moving it to the data store. In contrast, with independent data marts, the ELT process must be managed in its entirety, which means that data must be staged every time to be normalized, integrated and in dimensional formats. (Ariyachandra & Watson, 2012) For these reasons, I advocate the creation of dependent data stores to maximize performance and increase...... middle of paper ...... the provider can combine hospital data with clinic visit data via an automated system. systems that populate data marts. The data may be used for comparison purposes for individuals using the provider's clinical sites and hospital units for the episode of care. Relevant healthcare activities are captured and used to analyze the frequency of emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and clinic visits to see PCPs. This data is collected in a uniform format that is easily accessible and identifiable to your organization's asthma patients or patients with other chronic conditions. Data stores can be used for examining health system utilization, access to care, clinical outcome measures, business trend analysis, and other operational uses. Using data from data mart deployments has undefined limitations in learning about the population and processes to improve efficiency and coordination of care..