ABSTRACT
The use of data in health information technology (HIT), whether it's for the many aspects of patient care, operational and financial management, or other purposes, requires a computing context that is made up of both hardware and software. The infrastructure is primarily hardware, with associated firmware and software that provides for data storage and the computing environment that is necessary for applications and other software to run on. HIT architecture is typically focused around a central electronic health record (EHR) system and an associated relational database that is, in almost all cases, a database owned exclusively by the user organization regardless of its location. Most HIT systems in use, including practice management and EHR systems, as well as other directories and data warehouse efforts, are based on underlying relational database technology. Most healthcare organizations use either a report generator or a business intelligence tool to provide the query capability of the primarily practice management and EHR data that they manage.
