This is a great article on the power of business intelligence, where the use of BI is actually saving lives.
"BI can start unlocking the hidden value in NHS information and start providing clinicians, administrators and commissioners much more powerful ways of seeing the bigger picture in their organizations or networks. BI could, for instance, facilitate benchmarking around incidence, mortality, quality performance measures and access targets for different disease areas, among other factors, in a way that is accessible and aggregated on a single website."At the core of this issue is the "feedback loop" from those delivering care, and those that are defining and driving treatments. The reality is that the information existing within the clinical sites, such as hospitals, are not as well shared as you would think. Thus, the valuable data around what's working and what's not, is not aggregated to a single location where it can be better understood within a total context. In other words, there needs to be a single view of the treatment and outcome data which could cause treatments to change, which could drive a much hire cure rate.
"The Cancer Commissioning Toolkit (CCT) is a web-based BI tool that is providing an online, national view of responses and actions to cancer. The main impetus behind the CCT was the need to help cancer networks and primary care trusts commission cancer services more effectively, addressing the government's vision for 'World Class Commissioning' (Commissioning is the NHS term for planning and purchasing healthcare)."The core issues here are both data integration and information externalization. The fact of the matter is that the data resides in a federated universe, and accessing that data is often difficult, both technically and politically. The ability to see that data as a single abstract view, and run very telling analysis on that data, will come up quickly with the data points you need to make changes in treatments.
I can't imagine a more important BI application than this.
As an IT professional and a person with some direct knowlege about the price of Chemotherapy drugs in the US, I think this effort in theory is great - a fully functional BI database for this information would be invaluable, as there is a lot of misinformation and bad advice out there.
In practice however, the long list of major pharmaceutical companies supporting this effort makes me wonder if the assumptions, structure and availability of the data (i.e., the results) will be undistorted and objective.