DATA MINING IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

Abstract

Healthcare organizations, like other organizations, are facing a major global challenge.  In a recent Mckinsey survey (From “wartime” to “peacetime”: Five stages for healthcare institutions in the battle against COVID-19, 2020),  many consumers indicated that the COVID 19 pandemic has the most significant challenge on their economic and social lives in the last 100 years.  Being patient centric rather than reactive is one of the ways to succeed in this uncertain environment.  Being patient centric means to identify the needs of patients and design specific programs to address their needs whether they are financial, personal, or clinical.  COVID-19 accelerated utilizing data and online applications.  Many healthcare organizations have access to consumer related data.  Data mining capabilities provide health care organizations with the ability to extract hidden predictive information from large databases. The paper surveyed hospital Chief Information Officers (CIO), health information managers, and healthcare managers to find out measure awareness of data mining applications in healthcare and to determine the use and reason for data mining applications in healthcare. 

The results indicate that many healthcare organizations are aware of descriptive and simple data mining tools.  For more sophisticated data mining tools, most healthcare organization managers in the Middle East as expected are not aware of them.  When it comes to using data mining as an application for disease diagnoses, marketing, and education simulation, many healthcare managers indicate that they are already using data mining in these areas.