Monitoring Time Consumption in Complementary Diagnostic and Therapeutic Procedure Requests

Abstract

Over the years, information technologies and computer applications have been widespread amongst all fields, including healthcare. The main goal of these organizations is focused on providing quality health services to their patients, ensuring the provision of quality services. Therefore, decisions have to be made quickly and effectively. Thus, the increased use of information technologies in healthcare has been helping the decision-making process, improving the quality of their services. For an example, the insertion of Business Intelligence (BI) tools in healthcare environments has been recently used to improve healthcare delivery. It is based on the analysis of data in order to provide useful information. BI tools assist managers and health professionals through decision-making, since they allow the manipulation and analysis of data in order to extract knowledge. This work aims to study and analyze the time that physicians take to prescribe medical exams in Centro Hospitalar do Porto (CHP), though BI tools. The main concern is to identify the physicians who take more time than average to prescribe complementary means of diagnosis and treatment, making it possible to identify and understand the reason why it occurs. To discover these outliners, a BI platform was developed using the Pentaho Community. This platform presents means to represent information through tables and graphs that facilitate the analysis of information and the knowledge extraction. This information will be useful to represent knowledge concerning not only the prescription system (auditing it) but also its users. The platform evaluates the time prescription, by specialty and physician, which can afterwards be applied in the decision-making process. This platform enables the identification of measures to unravel the time differences that some physicians exhibit, in order to, subsequently, improve the whole process of electronic medical prescription.