The MIMIC-III database is a massive database of health care records for over 40,000 patients at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center from 2001 to 2012. The information is distributed across a couple dozen different files. It is a nice entry point for someone who wants to do research on electronic health care records. The data in MIMIC-III is anonymized and you can use the data for free, but you have to set up credentialing first. It’s not a difficult process, but it restrict me from using this on my website and in some of my classes. Thankfully, the developers of MIMIC-III have set up a much smaller demonstration database that is published under a very liberal open access license. It has all the same structure as the full MIMIC-III database including links between various tables and the number of records is much smaller, making this a perfect resource for showing some of the data management tasks that are part and parcel of most electronic health records databases. I am currently using this data in a class I am co-teaching, Introduction to SQL.
- Johnson, A., Pollard, T., & Mark, R. (2019). MIMIC-III Clinical Database Demo (version 1.4). PhysioNet. RRID:SCR_007345. doi: 10.13026/C2HM2Q