Impacts of business intelligence on population health: a systematic literature review

Abstract

"Business Intelligence" is an area of Information Technology (IT) that involves the collection, analysis and presentation of large amounts of data. BI has been successfully applied to promote good decision making in a variety of environments, and has high potential to make a significant impact in the domain of population health. The promotion of population health is a key concern of government authorities and various health institutions and officials making decisions about interventions that may impact on population health would benefit from the use of information on population health. BI could clearly be a facilitator in this regard, but evidence of its current application and impact in this field is not easily accessible to policy makers. This systematic literature review explored the literature and provided a synthesis of information available on the current use of BI in this area, and evidence of the impact of its use on population health. An array of applications of BI for population health were found, including data warehouses, analytics, reports, data warehouse browsers, OLAP, GIS, Dashboards and Alerts. Evidence of the impact of these applications on population health was mainly anecdotal, with only one empirical study found. Issues and challenges encountered in the development and use of BI are Privacy and Security, Data Quality and Development and Maintenance of BI infrastructure