The process of Extracting, Transforming, and Loading data in to a data warehouse is called Extract Transform Load (ETL) process.  This process can be used to obtain, analyze, and clean data from various data sources so that it can be stored in a uniform manner within a data warehouse. This data can then be used by various business intelligence processes to provide an organization with more of an in depth analysis of the current state of the company and where it is heading.

A standard ETL process that might be used by a health care system may include importing all of their patients names, diagnoses and prescriptions in to a unified data warehouse so that trends can be spotted in regards to outbreaks like the flu and also predict potential illness that a patient might be affected by based on other patients with similar symptoms.