Improving maternity care with business intelligence

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop clinical indicators for obstetrics through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) tools, since valid and reliable clinical indicators can help measuring quality of healthcare services and support decision-making processes. This paper gives an overview of concepts related to Health Information Systems (HIS) and BI, along with some related work to highlight the advantages that BI solutions can bring when applied to healthcare. In this paper is also presented the data warehousing and the ETL process, that was necessary for the development of indicators and which is usually hidden from end-users, is described. The indicators were developed using Power BI and were analysed and compared with reference values from both national and international health reports. The discussion of the developed indicators made it possible to measure the quality of the obstetrics service, to identify the problematic areas and to decide whether improvement measures should be taken.