The improvement of the clinical decision-making through the Business Intelligence

Much work has been done on applying Business Intelligence (BI) in the healthcare sector. Most of these studies were focused only on Information Technology (e.g., to improve the Information and Communication Technology architectures and data management systems) or medical (e.g., to support prognoses and diagnoses) aspects, while the usage of BI for improving the management of healthcare processes is still overlooked. This research aims at filling this gap by investigating whether a decision support system (DSS) based on the exploitation of data through BI can outperform traditional experience-driven practices for managing processes in the healthcare domain. To accomplish this objective, we develop a DSS for reducing the overall costs of a specific healthcare process in the oncology field. The DSS was developed in two versions: the first is experience-driven (i.e., based only on scientific and historical literature and physicians’ experience data), while the second is data-driven (i.e., based on additional information coming from hospital data). The results of our study demonstrate that the usage of BI for managing the healthcare processes proved to improve traditional activities and processes mostly based only on the physicians’ experience, both from a business (i.e., costs reduction) and managerial (i.e., effectiveness improving) point of view.