Question

You are an RHIA who is working in the compliance department of a long-term care corporation. You have been asked to create a database to capture data on privacy training efforts. This database will be used to collect data from all of the corporate offices.

Your instructions are as follows:

1. Identify the entities and list your attributes under each entity (use concepts of normalization)

2. Determine the relationship between each entity (one to one, one to many)

3. Draw your Entity Relationship Diagram

Answer 1

The basic step of Data Modelling is known as the first step in the process of database design. This step is sometimes considered to be a high level and abstract design phase, also referred to as conceptual design.

In the second step, the relationships and the constraints are expressed using the concepts provided by the high level data model. These concepts do not include the implementation details, the result of the data modelling process which is a formal representation of the database structure. This result is easy to understand as it is used as reference that the user’s requirements are met.

The third step is database design. During this step, there are two sub-steps: one called database logical design, which defines a database in a specific data model, and another called database physical design, which defines the internal database storage structure, file organization indexing techniques. In the database design, data are represented using a certain data model. The data model is a collection of concepts for describing data, data relationships, data semantics and data constraints. Most data models also include a set of basic operations for manipulating data in the database.

To illustrate an example we sample database called the COMPANY database to illustrate the concepts of the model. This database contains information about employees, departments and projects. There are several departments in the company. Each department has a unique identification, a name, location of the office and a particular employee who manages the department. Then, the department controls a number of projects, each of which has a unique name, a unique number and a budget. Each employee has a name, identification number, address, salary and birth date. An employee is assigned to one department who can join in several projects. We need to record the start date of the employee in each project. We also need to know the direct supervisor of each employee. We want to keep track of the dependents for each employee. Each dependent has a name, birth date and relationship with the employee. This is how the database is developed.

So, if an employee work for a department, this sketched by double lines, are called total or mandatory participation. If an employee may or may not manage a department, this is sketched by a single line and called partial participation.he above mentioned schematic diagram is an entity relationship diagram shows the relationships of entity sets stored in a database. An entity in this context is an object, a component of data. An entity set is a collection of similar entities. These entities can have attributes that define its properties.

By defining the entities, their attributes, and showing the relationships between them, an diagram illustrates the logical structure of databases. The diagrams are used to sketch out the design of a database.