Towards Clinical and Operational Efficiency through Healthcare Process Analytics

In the rapidly changing healthcare industry, keeping up with new technologies and innovations has become less of a desire and more of a requirement. Currently, business intelligence and analytics technologies are becoming breakthrough business drivers. In the face of the demand for provision of high-quality healthcare in a cost-effective way, healthcare organizations are recognizing the strategic role that advanced analytics can play in optimizing their processes. The ability to use data analytics in real time in order to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare processes can lead to better financial and budgetary performance, deeper citizen/patient-centric relationships and significant improvement in the way health care is conceived and delivered. This paper presents a framework for optimizing healthcare processes by analyzing process-related data in order to ensure that processes meet the stated operational and performance objectives. The framework is built on top of a data infrastructure that integrates process-related data from various sources into a structured view, suitable for analytics and decision support. Emphasis is also placed on security and patient privacy during execution of the optimized healthcare processes.