DHC 2008: Pre-Conference Themes and Variations, Business Intelligence and Health Analytics

Business intelligence is used regularly in other industries to management processes and people, but is now just beginning to be used in healthcare. The development of EMRs help collect structured clinical information that can form the basis for analysis, but healthcare is just at the infancy stages of performing analytics.

A first step in to measure endpoint outcomes, but collecting and analyzing data at various data points during the process helps greatly in understanding what is actually occurring.

Karen Knecht, Manager,IBM/Healthlink, explained how much of the data is stored at the departmental level, and reports are generated at that level. There is little integration of the reports that allow an overarching view of the available data. Lack of standardization of data and reports makes it difficult and expensive - uses high level skilled people - to obtain the reports.

John Daniels, CIO at Evolvent Technologies, suggested that his current work with the DOD is showing promise by using a virtual data network to allow seamless analysis. The challenges is creating and integrating the various data sources so that everyone who has a need for analysis can easily obtain it.

Can healthcare learn from other industries when it comes to BI? Although some believe healthcare is different, Erik Phelps, partner at Michael Best Friedrich, suggested that even in the retail industry, the concerns are just as complex as in healthcare. That said, data terminology issues are more difficult to tackle in healthcare.