DATA MINING IN HEALTHCARE

By

Ms. V.Vidhya

Asst. Professor

Department of MBA

Sankara College of Science and Commerce

Electronic Health Record has become a common healthcare facility in today’s scenario. With advance increase of technology in healthcare field the amount of patient data created is enormous. So the Healthcare providers focus on optimizing the efficiency and quality of their concern with use of Data mining.

Data mining is the process of extraction of usable data from the available large set of data. It involves data collection and warehousing as well as computer processing. To segment and evaluate the data the data mining uses sophisticated mathematical algorithms. It is also known as Knowledge Data Discovery (KDD). In healthcare data mining has been proved effective in areas like preventive medicine, CRM, detection of fraud and misuse of data and measuring the effectiveness of some treatments.

Measuring the effectiveness of some treatments

The application of data mining involves comparing the different sets of symptoms, causes and treatments given to the same set of patients and evaluating a possible quickest and easiest way for the same treatment. For example patients with similar disease can be compared with their drug regime and their response to the disease within the stipulated time. Based on the comparison we can formulate the treatment pattern for the same disease for future.

Detection of fraud and misuse of data

Here the normal patterns of medical claim is established and based on the same  unusual patterns are identified by insurance companies. For example by fixing up a normal pattern the insurance companies can detect any inappropriate referrals from the physicians or prescriptions from the doctors.

The data mining has its own negative effects like lack of patient data privacy. It is said that all the patient data shared in the data mining will not have any privacy. But experts say that it is worth taking risk as its benefits will help to save another life.

In India AI is playing major role to shift the see through of healthcare industry. Electronic Health Record is also gearing up to establish the patient data in huge amount. It has allowed the Physicians to share their patient data to others for betterment of the patient care and reduce the medical errors. Likewise data mining also helps to reduce the cost and improve the patient care and services. According to research by Mckinsey data mining can cut the healthcare cost upto 12-17%. The future of healthcare depends on data mining as it reduces the healthcare cost, identify the treatment plans, measures effectiveness, detect fraud medical claims and ultimately improves the patient care.