TEXT MINING & DECISION MAKING IN HEALTH CARE

Text Mining & Decision Making in Health Care

Text Mining & Decision Making in Health Care

Introduction

The need to record information regarding a patient is considered an old and important problem in medicine. Progress in this direction depends on the possibility of having adequate technical support. This concept has been changing over time, as they have increased the data collected and have modified the available technology.

It seems understandable that with the development of information technology that has occurred in recent years, there has been much progress in the process of collection storage and retrieval of patient data. However, the scope of information technology to this problem is scarce and limited. Despite the different development and technological advances that have occurred in the field of medical sciences, is still used for the collection of information the old system of paper patient records (files), where, paradoxically, the computer has reached very advanced stages of development in almost all spheres of life including its wide use in medicine itself (Obama, 2011).

The problems that are faced for decision making needs to be given serious importance in healthcare and resolve them so that better processes and systems can be implemented. Text mining plays a crucial role in resolving these problems and electronic medical records have brought a revolution in the field of health care. Text mining plays a key role in managing and dealing with serious problems in the health care management. In order to make effective decision-making, text mining is a highly efficient and effective technique. Text mining helps in extracting data from a large pool of disorganized data. It assists in clustering and grouping of data in an organized manner which becomes highly useful in minimizing the healthcare increasing problems. These problems are numerous and it is a serious concern for the physician and the entire health care department (Koh & Tan, 2005).

Decision making is a critical tool for minimizing the healthcare problems. The large amount of data which is available in a raw, dis-organized, inconsistent and non-standardized format leads towards incorrect and incomplete data records. It hinders in making effective decisions and results in problems of mistreatment, misdiagnosis and bad prescriptions. The health risks associated with these problems need to be resolved through proper decision making by the physicians and concerned people. The problems of mistreatment, misdiagnosis and bad prescriptions can be resolved through using text mining techniques and computerized healthcare information systems. These electronic medical records will be studied in this research to understand the importance of computerized records for health care decision making process. Moreover, the text mining techniques will be analyzed under the case studies which have greatly emphasized upon electronic information systems (O'Desky, Ball & Ball, 2000).

Discussion

Healthcare organizations have been successful in collecting large amount of data but extracting relevant information becomes a challenging task. In order to minimize the problems associated with mistreatment, bad prescription and misdiagnosis is the result of incapability in extracting and using data efficiently and ...