Processing of Data

Data Processing
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Data Processing
Data processing is vital in a clinical setting. Indeed, it enables clinicians to understand the number of patients affected by a particular illness and come up with an effective strategy to prevent it from spreading. Some of the most significant data processes that will be discussed in this paper include abstraction, reconciliation, and normalization.
Data abstraction entails providing crucial information to people and hiding the background details. With the implementation of the electronic health record (EHR), the processing of clinical records has become easy where healthcare professionals get the information that they want about their patients. For instance, when they want to know the number of patients affected by a specific disease, clinicians search the name of the illness on the database and the actual statistics (Zozus et al., 2015). When a doctor wants to know whether a particular patient has been admitted, one can use the patient code. Data abstraction enables clinicians to obtain the information they want from the EHR systems without knowing the internal processes that happen for them to get exactly what they want. Consequently, clinical records are abstracted to ensure that doctors obtain relevant information without understanding the calculations at the background of an EHR system.
Normalization refers to the process in which data in a database is organized. Specifically, it involves coming up with different tables and to establish their relationships by adhering to the rules that are designed to safeguard data in the database to improve its flexibility. The two primary things that one should avoid in the database normalization process are inconsistent dependency and redundancy. Redundant data usually creates maintenance issues and wastes disk space (Eessaar, 2016). Additionally, inconsistent dependencies breaks the path to specific data, which makes it challenging for users to locate the information they want. The primary rules of normalization are first, second, and third normal forms. In the 1st normal form, a person do away with the repeating groups in tables. Moreover, one creates tables that contain related data and identifies datasets using the primary key. In the 2nd normal form, an individual comes up with tables for sets of values in numerous records and connect them using the foreign key. Overall, o...