Moore's Law of Health Care

As organizations focus on strategic business initiatives, tried-and-true data mining technologies and processes are moving from the halls of academia into mainstream business practice.
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Increased IT processes throughout the health care industry enable organizations to collect and store information on nearly every interaction with patients and payer organizations — and from internal operations. In fact, according to a July 2003 report from IDC, the U.S. health care industry spent $17.3 billion in 2003 on IT systems. Today, a significant percentage of technology spending is allocated to database systems, which help capture patient-level financial and clinical data, as well as a swelling stream of data associated with physician drug orders (CPOE), medical images (PACS), electronic medical record text and hospital materials.

Unfortunately, a health care organization's ability to effectively utilize this collected information to support strategic business decisions lags behind the capacity to collect and store it. Nonetheless, if a health care organization can leverage data for supporting intelligent and integrated analysis about its operations, it will have an edge in today's increasingly competitive care delivery marketplace.

Consider the economics behind the technology intended to facilitate and improve the business processes and profitability of health care organizations. Gordon Moore, who later went on to co-found Intel, defined what's now known as "Moore's Law" in 1964. The law roughly states that computer processing power doubles every 18 months at a fixed cost. As a result, today we're able to easily purchase computers with processing power that dwarfs the capabilities of the machines available even five years ago.

But computer storage manufacturers have outpaced their colleagues who build processors. The amount of computer storage that can be bought for a fixed cost doubles approximately every nine months.

The effect of this new storage paradigm is that the means of accumulating information and storing it far outstrip an organization's capacity to process, sift through, analyze and utilize data. Moreover, as time passes, we're seeing an exponentially widening gap between the capacity to store data and the ability to process, prepare and analyze it.

Experts who can design and build data storage and transformation systems that efficiently support high-level strategic analysis play a primary role in bringing together an organization's data and its decision-makers. These experts provide business analysts and administrators with solid, supportable data and trends that translate into improved understanding of granular levels of financial and clinical performance.

Some forward-thinking organizations have begun to harness the value of the immense amounts of data captured through the information systems in which they have invested heavily. Uses range from advanced analytical reporting about drug order entry related to a patient's clinical outcome to drill-down trending reports that allow business analysts to ask ad-hoc questions about their data.

The data game
Significant progress has been made over the last three decades by academic researchers in database technology, statistics and machine learning. Now, tried-and-true data mining technologies and processes are moving from the halls of academia into mainstream business. Data mining, when correctly applied, helps put business decision-makers and their data assets "on the same page."

Historically, health care IT staff members have been the only ones with clear access to collected data. But things are beginning to change as business analysts and some clinicians request and generate reports from large database systems. However, those reports often take hours or days to run and do not enable the viewer to perform rapid and flexible analysis. Under current conditions, the ability to utilize trends and patterns for improved operations, quality measurement and profitability can be hampered due to the constraints of the information systems and the ability of the IT staff to service the needs of the entire organization.

In addition to enabling advanced trending and drill-through analysis, data mining can provide ample opportunity to uncover operational issues, abnormal trends, unidentified correlations and other "red flags" in an automated fashion.

Is your organization ready?

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BY Mike Albainy
Source：advanceweb.com

Mr. Albainy is a senior manager of client services with Chicago-based Apollo Data Technologies. He specializes in the deployment and analysis of data mining models, and leading the development of OLAP and data warehouse reporting systems.

© 2009 Merion Publications.