During the 8th HIBA Academic Congress 2013, the panel “Business Intelligence in Healthcare” was held, focusing on the need to apply business intelligence to the healthcare sector. It was coordinated by Dr. Alfredo Cancio, the Assistant Director of the Development Department at the Hospital Italiano in Buenos Aires.
On this occasion, Gustavo Ricardo Vignera, the director of Blue Patagon; Estanislao Martín Irigoyen, Director of Inteligentia; and Adrián Sueiro, Director of KMG, debated the role of analytical intelligence in the health sector.
What is Business Intelligence (BI) and what is it for?
BI refers to the group of technologies aimed at transforming data into information – and information into knowledge – whose mission is to help business decision makers work more intelligently.
Epidemiological Information
Gustavo Ricardo Vignera demonstrated the usability of “Tableu Public”, free BI software designed for healthcare organizations that helps to obtain epidemiological information and explained that it is an analytical tool that can improve and accelerate decision making processes.
He also mentioned the visual capacity of the software in analyzing healthcare data, which can be explored online by users.
Visualization of information and extraction of knowledge
“To transform Business Intelligence into Analytical Intelligence (AI) it is necessary to break down cultural barriers and get the software to understand human reasoning to renew the cycle of generation and obtainment of knowledge”, said Estanislao Martín Irigoyen.
AI is an interactive process that can transform data and information into workable knowledge. So, in order to take advantage of information visualization and knowledge extraction techniques, Irigoyen said that Inteligentia – the company sponsoring HIBA 2013 – proposes a change of paradigm: to switch from BI to AI.
Data samples and statistics
According to Adrián Sueiro, the key lies in focusing on the patient and analyzing the actual situation in the public and private healthcare sectors with data samples and statistics. He thus emphasized that it is important to survey the market to improve attention for users.
“The needs of health centers are: to improve access to healthcare, to work to improve care and results, to build sustainable healthcare systems, reduce waiting times for access to information and to improve the quality of information”, he said.
Furthermore, he also presented Cognos by IBM, a tool that makes it possible to observe and study large volumes of healthcare data based on the needs of healthcare establishments.
