News
Benefits of analytics for decision making in the healthcare sector
2 March 2010
The benefits of business analytics and evidence-based decision
making for the NHS were highlighted at The NHS Information Centre (IC)
Informative Healthcare Seminar last month.
This workshop involved health informatics specialists from across the
NHS, academia and suppliers, with the objective of learning from
analytics successes in banking, publishing and other sectors.
Paul Goodwin, Professor of Analytics at the University of Bath,
demonstrated how the public sector will benefit from new developments
such as analysing text, social network analysis and automatic large
scale forecasting, which will help gather better citizen insight, inform
decision making and improve outcomes.
SAS Business Analytics software is used by The NHS IC to improve the
level of service to NHS trusts and central agencies, supporting better
care for patients in primary, community, hospital and social care. Using
SAS helped create a standardised data management environment and
business analytics platform that integrates, manages and analyses
information across the NHS.
“There are many new and exciting developments in the world of
analytics that will have a big impact in the next year — not least of
which will be actively supporting the NHS in improving quality and
productivity, through the innovative use of information,” commented
Brian Derry, Executive Director of Information Services at The NHS IC.
“More and more organisations are establishing the right information
cultures and it was great to see, at this NHS IC event, some real-world
examples of how organisations in other sectors have done this and
achieved real improvements in their services.
“At The NHS IC, we have been able to realise a wide range of
operational efficiencies and improve our support to the NHS — all
because of the way we now use and share data. Instinctively most
peoples’ reactions are that the NHS is unique, but this event has shown
that the issues that we face are very similar to those of financial
services organisations, publishers and most other public sector bodies.
This event really struck everyone with how generic the drivers,
challenges, opportunities and methods are for data management, analysis
and the better use of information. We in the NHS have much to learn from
other sectors and this workshop seems to have fired the imaginations of
everyone present.”
Paul Goodwin’s key trends in Analytics for 2010:
- Analysing text: Transforming, organising and structuring
previously unstructured text opens up a whole new opportunity for
insight in customer and citizen behaviours and preferences.
Organisations can then add more valuable data into prediction models
than inform preventative policies.
- Social Network Analysis: As social network membership explodes
in popularity, organisations need to harness the information
available through them. Analysing who connects with whom, as well as
who the influencers in these social networks are, helps with
marketing/ awareness campaigns and also helps unearth fraudulent
activity.
- Visualisation: Some organisations and analysts are deceived by
randomness or make decisions based on intuition. Being able to see
data in more easy-to-use ways will extend the influence of accurate
and insightful analytics.
- Automatic Large Scale Forecasting: With some of the world’s
largest organisations making 12 million forecasts per week, there
are definitely opportunities to expand analytic parameters.
Automatic large scale forecasting not only increases insight into
data sets, but also enables far more valuable data optimisation and
simulations, which significantly enhance predictive capabilities.
“SAS is delighted that the experiences and best practices of other
SAS customers from across the public and private sectors proved to be so
relevant and valuable.” Commented Dave Waltho, Head of Government
Affairs, SAS UK. ”Organisations as varied as VOSA, HSBC & Wolters Kluwer
explained how they are deriving huge business value from managing
information as a key strategic asset —using it not simply to report
performance but to transform it. In particular, the examples of the
power of analytics to help organisations break out of the reactive cycle
of ‘fail and fix’ and into proactive ‘predict and prevent’, was not lost
on an NHS audience committed to promoting health rather than just
treating illness.”
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