Best data administration practices for data migration: a literature study in the healthcare industry

Abstract

This paper investigates the most practical and effective data administration concepts in order to improve data migrations, especially in healthcare systems. Currently healthcare is experiencing an increase in heterogeneous environments due to new mergers and acquisitions. One of the main concerns is identifying similar data between different systems during migrations. This leads to project scopes being exceeded because of a lack of effective data administration practices. The aim of this article is to explore best practices for migrating data and to structure this into a basic framework so that it can be adapted to almost any IT environment. Best practices identified include data modelling, data cleansing and information repository. The framework is further applied to a medical aid administrator case to demonstrate its ease of use. The results from the case prove that our framework is both simple and effective in its application, optimising on time and effort for current and future projects.