York University Professors Christo El Morr and Hossam Ali-Hassan have co-authored the new book Analytics in Healthcare: A Practical Introduction (Springer), which unpacks analytics in an accessible, easy-to-read way for non-specialists.
El Morr is an associate professor of health informatics in the Faculty of Health and Ali-Hassan is an assistant professor of business administration at Glendon Campus.
Analytics in Healthcare: A Practical Introduction offers a beginner’s guide to health-care analytics that does not require a background in artificial intelligence, data science or statistics. It presents the basic analytics techniques and their applications through multiple examples.
In the health-care field, professionals have access to vast amounts of data in the form of staff records and electronic patient records, including clinical findings, diagnosis, prescription drug, medical imaging procedure, mobile health, resources available and more. Managing the data and analyzing it to properly understand it and use it to make well-informed decisions can be a challenge for managers and health-care professionals.
“Analytics constitute a set of tools that can assist in addressing this challenge,” said El Morr. “While many books exist in analytics and some are dedicated for health care, the vast majority are dedicated for engineers and remain inaccessible for the larger audience from the health-care sector. This book is written with non-specialized readers in mind.”
A new generation of applications, sometimes referred to as end-user analytics or self-serve analytics, is specifically designed for non-technical users such as managers and business professionals.
“The ability to use these increasingly accessible tools with the abundant data requires a basic understanding of the core concepts of data, analytics and interpretation of outcomes,” said Ali-Hassan “This book is a resource for such individuals to demystify and learn the basics of data management and analytics for health care, while also looking towards future directions in the field.”
The book takes informatics and management approaches to clarify in simple language what analytics are; the value offered by the descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytics; and how analytics are being used to solve health-care problems, according to El Morr.
“Data visualization paradigms are presented with clear, real-life examples. The new perspectives in the field, as well as some of the ethical challenges, are discussed,” said Ali-Hassan.