5.4 Data analytics applications

According to the World Health Organization, data analytics applications in healthcare offer the opportunity to improve decision-making clinical skills, enact a patient-centred care approach, produce a higher quality of care, improve disease monitoring, early diagnosis and detection of health threats and risk stratification of certain medical conditions, as well as optimise health resources (WHO, 2021).

Real-life monitoring of patients provides the ability for policymakers and frontline staff to make informed and timely decisions to improve patient outcomes. In some instances, real-life patient data can be used from EMRs to provide information on readmission probability of patients with complex comorbidities. Healthcare is now focused on the prevention of hospital readmission, maintaining a community-based approach to manage health organisation resources (Suresh, 2016). Patient readmission to hospital has a large impact on hospital resources; it is often a large operating cost and can deny other patients from accessing urgent and vital care.