Performance Assessment Of EMR Systems Based On The Database Cache

Traditional hospital information systems in China primarily execute transaction processing but little clinical information management. Relational databases can accommodate the demands in most situations because the data are always small in volume, with low complexity, and of the simple type. However, with the development of information system, modern hospital information systems puts more emphasis on the clinical information systems, which has larger data bulk and more disorderly data type, and more complex data relationship. All these result in the situation that the processing speed of relational database can’t meet the requirement of the system in hospital. The maintenance cost of database increase simultaneously.Post-relational database is widely used in information systems recently. The post-relational database, Cache, designs database in the object-oriented way, which approaches to solve the problem that that two-dimensional tables’relevance is over complex when there are too many tables in the database. Post-relational database has been widely used in Occident, and show efficient performance in actual running.Although it is congruously approved that post-relational database shows better performance than relational database in hospital information systems, there is rare research on the quantitative analysis in this aspect. In this thesis, we introduce a new-generation electronic medical records (EMR) system, which was developed with the post-relational database Cache and the latest platform Ensemble. Performance tests of databases in EMR systems were implemented in two sections. First, a comparison test was conducted between a post-relational database, Cache, and a relational database, Oracle, embedded in the EMR systems. Second, a user terminal test was done on the EMR system. The results proved that the post-relational database Cache works faster than the relational database Oracle and showed perfect performance in the real-time EMR system.