Healthcare

Healthcare is the domain-knowledge pillar of healthcare analytics. Here are some of the significant healthcare areas of knowledge that comprise healthcare analytics:

• Healthcare delivery and policy: An understanding of how the healthcare industry is structured, who the major players in healthcare are, and where the financial incentives lie can only help us in improving healthcare analytics endeavors.
• Healthcare data: Healthcare data is rich and complex, whether it is structured or unstructured. However, healthcare data collection often follows a specific template. Knowing the details of the typical history and physical examination (H&P) and how data is organized in a medical chart goes a long way in helping us turn that data into knowledge.
• Clinical science: A familiarity with medical terminology and diseases helps in knowing what's important in the vast ocean of medical information. Clinical science is commonly divided into two areas: physiology, or how the human body functions normally, and pathology, or how the human body functions with a disease. Some basic knowledge of both can be very helpful in doing effective healthcare analytics.

An introduction to healthcare for healthcare analytics will be provided in Chapter 2, Healthcare Foundations.