Introduction

The healthcare industry is at a profound pivot point driven by rising healthcare costs. One of the long-standing challenges in healthcare informatics has been the ability to deal with the sheer variety and volume of disparate healthcare data—and the increasing need to glean actionable insights that drive performance improvement. The McKinsey study suggests that in aggregate the use of big data in US healthcare alone can create value in excess of $300 billion annually, including a 0.7% annual growth in productivity. Increasingly, managers in healthcare organizations require the kind of realtime pattern recognition and sense-making that only a deliberate data strategy and approach can yield. Most contemporary business intelligence and/or analytics books have primarily focused on little data—the data that is primarily generated within their own proverbial four walls of the hospital or health system. For clinically integrated health systems that offer outpatient and inpatient care delivery, the amount of reporting continues to increase.