Data mining in medical records for the enhancement of strategic decisions: a case study

The impact and popularity of competition concept has been increasing in the last decades and this concept has escalated the importance of giving right decision for organizations. Decision makers have encountered the fact of using proper scientific methods instead of using intuitive and emotional choices in decision making process. In this context, many decision support models and relevant systems are still being developed in order to assist the strategic management mechanisms. There is also a critical need for automated approaches for effective and efficient utilization of massive amount of data to support corporate and individuals in strategic planning and decision-making. Data mining techniques have been used to uncover hidden patterns and relations, to summarize the data in novel ways that are both understandable and useful to the executives and also to predict future trends and behaviors in business. There has been a large body of research and practice focusing on different data mining techniques and methodologies. In this study, a large volume of record set extracted from an outpatient clinic’s medical database is used to apply data mining techniques. In the first phase of the study, the raw data in the record set are collected, preprocessed, cleaned up and eventually transformed into a suitable format for data mining. In the second phase, some of the association rule algorithms are applied to the data set in order to uncover rules for quantifying the relationship between some of the attributes in the medical records. The results are observed and comparative analysis of the observed results among different association algorithms is made. The results showed us that some critical and reasonable relations exist in the outpatient clinic operations of the hospital which could aid the hospital management to change and improve their managerial strategies regarding the quality of services given to outpatients.