NMKMS (Data Warehousing For Navy Medicine)

WMPNJ Software has a great deal of experience in data warehousing. Our President, Bill Hamilton, was the Chief Architect and Project Director of the Naval Medicine Knowledge Management System (NMKMS). Several team members worked on the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL), data model, GUI installer, and various other aspects of the project.

NMKMS was used by the Navy's Combat Trauma Registry (CTR) to electronically capture, store and forward casualty encounters in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) for almost two years. It is currently deployed on the SPAWAR Atlantic R&D network while awaiting an ATO. NMKMS is the first application to use a standardized vocabulary to conform AHLTA-T B2R1, SAMS 8 and 9, TC2, and CTR patient encounter modules into one data warehouse.

NMKMS incorporates several unique techniques including:

1. Separation of the data storage from the data reporting layer through the use of data marts. Data marts themselves are not unique or novel, but NMKMS uses them exclusively to provide data to reporting and visualization tools. Doing so guarantees third-party reporting tools that they will not break when the underlying data structures of NMKMS change. As NMKMS is constantly evolving to incorporate new facts and dimensions, this is a key architectural decision. It also allows NMKMS to scale easily.
2. The use of cyclic redundancy checksums (CRC) to identify duplicate data. The strategic use of CRC values allows NMKMS to reuse certain data elements while also guaranteeing that data will not be repeated. This is especially important when data is collected in austere far-forward environments and may arrive through several different means to the data warehouse. NMKMS can guarantee that operational workload reporting, syndromic surveillance alerting, etc. do not report on inflated numbers or throw false positives based on duplicative data.