Question

The DeGruy article describes the use of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) data mining techniques to identify meaningful patterns in large data sets. The article also demonstrates how other industries have leveraged this new-found knowledge for fraud detection, marketing and customer retention. Although this article was published in 2000, it remains relevant since health care continues to struggle with mining health care data to improve outcomes.

The Evans article describes an application of KDD in healthcare that uses an enterprise data warehouse to identify patients at risk for specific conditions and to alert providers to targeted interventions and treatment options.

For this forum, describe other ways (administrative, clinical or financial) an enterprise data warehouse or data mart could be used to improve care delivery.  You may want to pull examples from your own experience, expand on the ones mentioned in the readings, or research other uses. please answer with at 250 words.

Answer 1

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) provides a platform to integrate all data amalgamating inpatient and outpatient zones. It is highly beneficial for strategic decision making and can also be leveraged upon for clinical care based on patient condition.

Key benefits from EDW:

1) Admistrative streamlining: By approaching data from different sources from a solitary stage, healthcare administrators no longer need to depend on constrained information or their impulse. Moreover, information distribution centers can easily be applied to a business' procedures, for example, showcase division, deals, hazard, stock, and money related administration.Administrative business applications indicated the following advantages:

- Impromptu questions could be utilized to find concealed information from coded fields, content reports, and research facility esteems.

- Information mining strategies or Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) obtained from industry could be utilized to recognize connections in huge databases.

- Information mining procedures had the option to settle on business choices that can impact cost, income, and operational productivity while keeping up a significant level of care.

Example: Earlier the demand for health care equpiments/ hospital facilities experienced a surge and patients could not be catered upon. But with the onset of accurate forecasting techniques through EDW, optimum number of equipments were available to the patients.

It also faciliated tracking of patients with multi drug resistant bacteria and timely, quarantining them before they could carry the pathogens to any other facility.

2) Improvement in clinical care: Deciphering gene-disease relationship, understanding the genetic health data pattern and monitoring patterns in drug use are some of the key utilities of EDW in clinical care.

Example: In patients, who had been diagnosed with a particular chronic ailment, drugs could be timely administered upon and the optimum dosage based on the stage, was also calculated upon.

Also, for every new patient, history of medical record and family health history could be checked, which would prevent any delay in diagnosis, preventing medical negliegence of any sort.

3) Financial optimization: Information warehousing through EDW leads to financial optimization by keeping up a durable database of present and past information. By changing information into intentional data, decision makers can perform progressively utilitarian, exact, and dependable examination and make increasingly valuable ROI reports easily.

Example: Vaccine potency plays a key in healthcare industry and vaccines in general are very expensive to procure. Earlier, vaccines that lost potency led to losses for healthcare administrators, since they had to be thrown away.

However, with the onset of EDW, vaccines were stored and sold based on the data integrated by the source. This propelled and an improvement in last mile distribution of these vaccines, preventing them from losing out on potency.

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