Objective and main results

This study investigates how combinations of big data analytics (BDA) capabilities and other organizational elements lead to improved healthcare performance.

Main findings:

The findings suggest that BDA implementation depends on the joint effects of BDA capability, complementary organizational resources, and organizational capabilities. Various combinations can improve average excess readmission rates and patient satisfaction in healthcare organizations.

• Data analytical and interpretation represent the most important components of BDA system for healthcare organizations. Most solutions achieving a high level of quality of care have a high level of analytical and data interpretation capabilities, combined with data integration capability, predictive capability, and analytics personnel’s technical skills.
  • Analytical capability refers to the ability to drive decisions and actions through the extensive use of data and different analytical techniques based on the specific mechanisms used for analytics, thus addressing the various needs of users and other stakeholders
  • Data interpretation capability refers to the ability to produce a healthcare matrix and reports that evaluate patient care and service and identify areas for improvement.

Summary of practical implications

The results lead to increased understanding of how big data analytics can be implemented into practice for healthcare organizations. It could be a useful guidance for practitioners, outlining a variety of paths that they can follow. Based on the patterns identified, healthcare organization managers can adopt solutions specifically tailored to their own characteristics or situations to achieve high healthcare quality and avoid the expensive pitfalls of misplaced BDA investments.

The analysis indicates that healthcare organization should emphasize improving their analytical and data interpretation capabilities to achieve low readmission rates.

Data interpretation capability can generate meaningful clinical summaries in real time or near real time and present them in an easily interpreted format using visual dashboards/systems to yield sharable information and knowledge, such as historical reports, executive summaries, drill-down queries, statistical analyses, and time series comparisons to different decision-makers. It is important for healthcare organizations to develop interpretation capability by providing analytical training courses to those employees who will play a critical support role in the new information-rich work environment in the earlier stages of BDA adoption.

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