Applicability of Business Intelligence in Electronic Health Record

Clinical datasets provide an excellent environment in which combined analyses of both structured and unstructured datasets can prove fruitful and useful. With an increasing need to deploy Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR), there is also a corresponding need to apply data mining technologies to extract quality data and inference rules from the information stored in those electronic records so as to provide real-time decision supports and evidence-based practice to clinicians and healthcare providers. Business Intelligence (BI) has emerged as a technology that has the potential to operationalize the repository content of EHR in supporting evidence-based practice and improving the quality of healthcare delivery. In this paper, a literature review was used to explore the key benefits, challenges, and obstacles of incorporating the BI technology into EHR so as to improve the quality and safety of healthcare delivery.