Healthcare Magazine September 2014 | Page 35

Harnessing the Power of Big Data
each year and approximately one million unstructured case files each month , but using Microsoft business intelligence is able to see patterns in the data to identify potential outbreaks of infectious disease , effectiveness of vaccination programs and other public health threats .
Just as government agencies have the opportunity to become more coordinated , integrated and streamlined , hospitals can also apply technology to break down silos of information across systems to visualize a common picture , share intelligence and increase collaboration . Within hospitals or regional health systems , business
intelligence can be applied to patient and operational data to identify best practices for clinical care that can be broadly replicated to improve outcomes and reduce costs .
This is exactly what Oslo University Hospital in Oslo , Norway is doing . Established in 2010 following the merger of four smaller hospitals , Oslo University Hospital sought to mine data from those separate databases for enterprise-wide analysis comparing utilization and rationale for different types of imaging used by radiology departments ( e . g ., x-rays , CAT scans , vs . MRIs ). With the cloud-based self-service business intelligence tool , they can analyze
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