As the field of healthcare continues to become more specialized, the provision of services by many healthcare workers to many patients may increase. In other words, healthcare delivery has been organized into specialized departments or healthcare sources such as, for example, nursing, laboratory, pharmacy, radiology and the like. Each department has responsibility for accomplishing its particular, often specialized, subset of tasks. Sometimes the departments are associated with different healthcare enterprises or offices having different geographic locations. Accordingly, the provision of healthcare services to patients by multiple healthcare workers may result in sub-optimal healthcare operations because patient information related to a single patient, stored in various different location may not be easily accessible.
This patient information, or medical data, may be stored in a database environment configured to store large volumes of data. Furthermore, the medical data stored in the database environment may be processed by, for example, searching the unstructured medical data, such as patient test results. Details with respect to conventional methods for storing and/or accessing medical data in and/or from databases is discussed in, for example, United States Patent Publication Nos. US 2003/0088438 and US 2003/0177132.
However, as the amount of available medical data expands and becomes more unstructured, it may become increasingly difficult to store and/or access unstructured medical data. For example, as genomic data has been mapped, the amount of data that can be searched has expanded rapidly thereby increasing the difficulty of storing and accessing the medical data for purposes of diagnosing various medical conditions and/or researching medical areas. Accordingly, there is a need to improve storage of, access to and modeling of medical data.