Prediction and Decision Making in Health Care Using Data Mining

Tendency for data mining application in healthcare today is great, because healthcare sector is rich with information, and data mining is becoming a necessity. Healthcare organizations produce and collect large volumes of information on daily basis. Use of information technologies allows automatization of processes for extraction of data that help to get interesting knowledge and regularities, which means the elimination of manual tasks and easier extraction of data directly from electronic records, transferring onto secure electronic system of medical records which will save lives and reduce the cost of the healthcare services, as well and early discovery of contagious diseases with the advanced collection of data. Data mining can enable healthcare organizations to predict trends in the patient conditions and their behaviors, which is accomplished by data analysis from different perspectives and discovering connections and relations from seemingly unrelated information. Raw data from healthcare organizations are voluminous and heterogeneous. They need to be collected and stored in the organized forms, and their integration enables forming of hospital information system. Healthcare data mining provides countless possibilities for hidden pattern investigation from these data sets. These patterns can be used by physicians to determine diagnoses, prognoses and treatments for patients in healthcare organizations.