Business intelligence and health care Research Proposal

Business intelligence and health care - Research Proposal Example Application of business intelligence in healthcare facilitates in streamlining raw data into meaningful and useful information for fostering better decision-making (Hennen, 2009). Thus, paper would be studying hospitals to evaluate how business intelligence is applied to identify healthcare imperatives that impact healthcare delivery for patients and financial benefits for the healthcare organizations. The increasing cost of healthcare consumes nearly 18%of the current US GDP (Ramsey et al., 2013). The healthcare reforms have considerably expanded the umbrella for health insurance coverage of all Americans including those with pre-existing diseases. The increasing burden on the healthcare institutions for providing quality care at affordable cost has become a huge concern because the interests of the payers and providers get directly linked to the quality of treatment and health outcome. Mettler and Vimarlund (2009) insist that technology can significantly contribute to the delivery of quality healthcare with economic transparency and real-time availability of critical information. Thus, business intelligence becomes pertinent issue in healthcare for exploiting information to manage patient care, improve quality and control costs for defined population or individual. Business intelligence in healthcare can broadly be described as leveraging information about patients for optimizing health outcome (Ferranti et al., 2010). Creating database of pertinent information regarding various aspects of healthcare serves as important mechanism for making decisions for optimal patients’ outcome. The information can be used judiciously by the hospital to reduce cost in repeating tests, facilitate analysis of clinical data and proactively involving patients in managing self-care. Most importantly, BI promotes transparency on real-time basis and therefore considerably reduces fraudulent practices and sub-standard quality of healthcare