Health care

Health care (or healthcare) is the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in humans. Health care is delivered by practitioners in medicine, chiropractic, dentistry, nursing, pharmacy, allied health, and other care providers. It refers to the work done in providing primary care, secondary care and tertiary care, as well as in public health.

The delivery of modern health care depends on groups of trained professionals and paraprofessionals coming together as interdisciplinary teams.[4][5] This includes professionals in medicine, nursing, dentistry and allied health, plus many others such as public health practitioners, community health workers and assistive personnel, who systematically provide personal and population-based preventive, curative and rehabilitative care services.

While the definitions of the various types of health care vary depending on the different cultural, political, organizational and disciplinary perspectives, there appears to be some consensus that primary care constitutes the first element of a continuing health care process, that may also include the provision of secondary and tertiary levels of care
The health care industry incorporates several sectors that are dedicated to providing health care services and products. As a basic framework for defining the sector, the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification categorizes health care as generally consisting of hospital activities, medical and dental practice activities, and "other human health activities". The last class involves activities of, or under the supervision of, nurses, midwives, physiotherapists, scientific or diagnostic laboratories, pathology clinics, residential health facilities, or other allied health professions, e.g. in the field of optometry, hydrotherapy, medical massage, yoga therapy, music therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, chiropody, homeopathy, chiropractics, acupuncture, etc.[14]

In addition, according to industry and market classifications, such as the Global Industry Classification Standard and the Industry Classification Benchmark, health care includes many categories of medical equipment, instruments and services as well as biotechnology, diagnostic laboratories and substances, and drug manufacturing and delivery.

For example, pharmaceuticals and other medical devices are the leading high technology exports of Europe and the United States.[15][16] The United States dominates the biopharmaceutical field, accounting for three-quarters of the world’s biotechnology revenues
Health care is growing rapidly in terms of the quantity and quality of data that is collected on a daily basis. Problem is that this data is growing faster than the provider can analyze it. As the world’s population increases so will this problem. The health care providers are facing the challenge of not only providing the best care for their patients, but doing it in a cost effective method to insure that they can provide services that are affordable. This is where Business Intelligence comes in. Business intelligence is the extraction of pertinent data from the massive data collected so for in health care. There are three categories of data that are mined[23], they are:

1. Patient data (clinical)
1. Patient Information
2. Patient History
3. Diagnosis
4. Treatments or Procedures
2. Financial Data
1. Eligibility
2. Billing
3. Insurance Claims
3. Institutional Data (operations)
1. Resources available
2. Resources used
3. Inventory & Supply details

Some of this data is easy to extract and readily available to healthcare administrators, however the patient or clinical data is not as easy to Extract, Transform and Load. The reason that this data is more difficult to extract is that the data itself is more subjective than calculated. The data comes from notes and observations and to extract it properly the data needs to be considered within its context.[24]

The process of analyzing health care data is a monumental task and one that must be done properly and continually. For these reason it becomes very costly and consumes a large number of IT resource hours.