One of the industries that seem to be adopting Business Intelligence at a fast rate is the Healthcare industry. Almost all of the large hospitals are using Business Intelligence platforms or tools and/or using information management services for several years. Even though health care industry is very well advanced technically, it is facing some serious issues related to finance. The diagnosis and treatment options available to patients are the most sophisticated in the world. New therapies and life saving pharmaceuticals are coming onto the market every year.
All of the databases in healthcare organizations contain a vast store of clinical, operational and insurance data, including patient histories, supply inventories, vendor invoices, admissions data and unstructured information such as patient verbatims, radiology images and scanned documents.With this data, hospitals are looking to find business solutions related to costs, revenues, quality of patient care and so on. A sample snippet of a healthcare organization's bus matrix.
Standard Architecture of Health-Care Information Systems
Some of the topics that hospitals look to BI tools to answer are:
- Reduce costs
- Methods to increase revenue
- Manage supply chain
- Analysis on effective vs non effective patient care
- Claims and bill payment
A star schema can be useful in answering the Business related questions pertaining to Health Care. An example of a star schema is as follows. This is an accumulating snapshot fact table for Claims and bill payment.
There are instances where a patient might be diagnosed with multiple issues. Rather than having multiple foreign key references to an "issue" table it is preferred if we had a single diagnosis key which contains information about a patients specific diagnosis.
We model this by using bridge tables
Diagnosis group Key: Many-to many join to a diagnosis group bridge table which contains a separate row for each individual diagnosis in a particular group.
Some of the popular tools used currently in the health care industry are:
- IBM Cognos
- Microstrategy
- Oracle
- SAS
- Tableau
