We’ve reached the halfway point of summer, and many of us at Dimensional Insight are using this time to catch up on our reading. If you’re looking for some reading to close out your summer around business intelligence (BI), analytics and healthcare, here are our recommendations.
Supply Chain Transformation: Practical Roadmap to Best Practice Results
Author Richard Sherman delivered the keynote at the Dimensional Insight Users Conference for Suppliers, Manufacturers and Distributors. And with good reason – he is a dynamic speaker and he fully understands the trends in the supply chain world. In this book, Sherman provides guidance to supply chain professionals on how they can make the case for change within their organizations. He also provides a road map to companies and offers advice on how they can transform supply chain management to achieve operations excellence.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don’t
Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger—all by the time he was 30. In this book, drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data. Most predictions fail, often at great cost to society, because most of us have a poor understanding of probability and uncertainty.
Data Preparation for Data Mining
With the convergence of massively scalable analytical databases and significant advances in highly vectorized machine learning algorithms, less attention is being paid to data quality or to the selection of features and training records before attempting to generate predictions from our data. But “Garbage In” is still “Garbage Out”. In this classic work from 1999, Dorian Pyle delves into the myriad considerations and techniques for transforming noisy real world data into a representation suitable for deriving actionable intelligence from our (exponentially growing) data volumes.
This is a brief primer on measuring quality in healthcare, published by The National Quality Forum. This publication has gathered input from not only people throughout the healthcare industry, but also from patients and their families. It’s a quick read (just 20 pages long), offering basic information and a good perspective on how performance measures can help ensure appropriate and high-quality care for patients.
Healthcare Business Intelligence
Written by Laura Madsen, this is an informative book on how business intelligence can be applied to healthcare. It includes the processes and approaches that have proven successful in hospital settings. Among the areas covered are the five tenets of healthcare business intelligence, tips for creating a BI team and what healthcare organizations should focus on first. The book also has a good forward written by Dr. John Halamka, CIO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Clinical Integration: A Roadmap to Accountable Care
This book by Bruce Flareau, MD et al. has comprehensive information on emerging organization structures in healthcare, from ACOs to clinically integrated networks to patient-centered medical homes. Some of the issues discussed include the complexities of quality measurement, the importance of physician and collaborative leadership, and the continued adoption of new health information technologies. It is written by some of the foremost experts in the field. (As a side note, the lead author happens to be our customer at BayCare Health System and one of the original sponsors of Physician Performance Advisor.)
Best Care at Lower Cost: The Path to Continuously Learning Health Care in America
The increasing cost of healthcare is one of the most talked-about topics in our country today. So how do you reduce costs while still providing top-notch care? This book by the Institutes of Medicine is a detailed study of the state of healthcare in the U.S. with prescriptions for moving forward. It includes excellent case studies from the leading healthcare organizations in the country included. You can either download a free whitepaper or buy the hard-copy book on the web page.
These books are sure to keep us busy for the rest of the summer (and beyond). What are the best business intelligence books that you are reading? Let us know in the comments box.
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Kathy started her career in television news writing and producing. She then worked at a public relations agency and as a freelance writer before joining Dimensional Insight in 2013.
Kathy has presented at several events in both healthcare and wine & spirits, including the Healthcare Innovation Summit, the Healthcare IT Marketing & PR Conference (HITMC), and the WSWA Women’s Leadership Council (WLC) Conference. Kathy is a Fellow in the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and a member of Women of the Vine & Spirits.
She is also host of the Smarter Healthcare Podcast (www.smarthcpodcast.com) and is a member of the Forbes Communications Council.
Kathy holds a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Boston University.
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