Enhancing healthcare value by applying proactive measures: the role for business analytics and intelligence

Healthcare is one of the most data rich and data generating industries. Yet, these data tend to be discontinuous, incomplete, lacking standardisation, or even erroneous and unusable. Pressure is increasing for healthcare organisations to provide increased value by improving health outcomes at a lower cost. In order to address these challenges, business analytics and intelligence (BA/BI) are critical strategic tools used to methodically analyse the wealth of seemingly disparate healthcare data sets and provide enhancement of healthcare's overall performance through data driven decision making. For acute and chronic oncology care processes, these pressures are mounting given the rising costs and increasingly complicated processes under the rising numbers and ages of the population. Given these pressures to improve healthcare value, this study proposes a systematic framework for the application of business analytics at one of the largest tertiary hospitals in Melbourne, Australia, in the quest for optimising healthcare.