Business Intelligence in Healthcare

TO MAKE A PROFIT DRIVEN BUSINESS decision, every company depends on their strategic planning and decision-making ability and that depends on the kinds of information available and the ability to sort out the relevant ones for analysis. Business Intelligence (BI) is solely offers solution to data warehousing and data analysis and hence is now the most talked about technology in the world business arena. BI is now used in various sectors for increasing productivity by carefully studying data, sharing and extracting value from it so in the case of hospital management or health sector.

In Hospitals

Healthcare industry whether hospital or any pharmaceutical companies face a lot amount of data flow that needs to be managed and that to in real-time like patient flow, emergency department, and maintaining and tracking all immediate events. For example, there are 10 patients in ED out of which 2 are for x-ray, 3 have pending labs and 5 were just admitted, so as soon as a bed become available, one patient should be transferred immediately to vacate the Emergency room. But this requires data based on our daily work process. So it becomes essential to maintain that information wirelessly or manually for managing work flow with updated information about patient treatment.

Here, in case of hospital Business Intelligence information must be accessible to every staff member that makes it much easier for rapid action. However, like any other enterprise health care also need cross-organizational data gathering. For example, determining the number of patient suffered in a particular diseases and a particular area, which helps in understanding the cause of outbreak and provides an analytical display image of real-time trends.

The above mentioned information is useful for all employees including, doctors, nurses, and executives etc. to manage their day-to-day activities accordingly. However, BI is also useful in pharmaceutical and other healthcare fields.

In Pharmaceutical Industry

For any pharmaceutical company it is important to manufacture medical products according to requirements and hence they need to have all information regarding medicine and all medical products. Company has to first point out the product that is been in demand for a particular diseases and so seeks the assistance of physicians and professionals who prescribe the drugs. Here, the company wants to collect as much information about these professionals with their specialties, preferred treatments, prescribing history etc. So they collect all these information from various sources either by their own sales representative or by collecting data from Internet. Therefore, they opt for Business Intelligence (BI) tools for generating a better information management environment for data analysis and decision-making.

Benefits

Use of business intelligence technology in healthcare primarily reduces the overall operating cost by decreasing the cost of medical professionals, lab and medical equipments, cost for specific medical operation. The most important thing is that better data management helps in better patient treatment in terms of timely admittance, diagnosis and reducing risk in casualty. Data is also managed to record and analyze the history of patient and statistics of a particular medical hazard based on area. This supports in evidence based medicine.