1. What is Business Intelligence?
A broad category of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions.

2. Case study session: The BI/Analytics Game
“Of course, buying furniture through, say, the Ikea catalog is unlikely to send you to the emergency-room …”
Natasha Singer, 2014

3. Ikea and ER visits? Health care & analytics: What is this game about?
Information— A different game
What is business intelligence?

4. Health care and analytics: What is this game about?
A link between Internet usage and ER visits
Descriptive?
Predictive?
Prescriptive?
Mostly predictive but it involves collecting, storing, accessing, and analyzing descriptive data—using predictive methodology—for prescriptive reasons!

5. BUT, how is the new data collected?
Why mostly predictive?
It focuses on predicting which types of patients are more likely to visit the ER!
Descriptive “patient” data:
Claims, prescriptions, census records (NOT new!)
Household income, education level, marital status, race, ethnicity, number of children at home, number of cars, Internet usage (what websites you visit online and what you buy) and so on (NEW!)
Acxiom, a marketing analytics company that obtains consumers’ information from both public records and private sources.
Old + New = Mail-order shoppers and Internet users are more likely, than some other members, to use emergency services
BUT, how is the new data collected?

6. Ikea and ER visits?
Homebound
No access to transportation
Not really a thing BUT the Ikea catalog shopper could be a proxy for other factors having a bearing on whether you visit the ER.
What are some examples?

7. Health care and analytics: What is this game about?
Why do health care providers care about which types of patients are more likely to visit the ER?
Influence well-insured patients to spend more money on health care.
Impose higher premium on riskier patients.
Is this a problem?
PRESCRIPTIVE

8. Health care and analytics: What is this game about?
BUSINESS
PROBLEM
COLLECT DATA
Prescriptive reasons!
BUSINESS
GOAL
APPLY
METHODS

9. Information—A different game
“Sales data remain one of a company's most important assets” The Economist
Stocking up on given products at certain times can be crucial!

10. What is Business Intelligence?
A broad category of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions.

11. A game of agony and torture
“Torture the data long enough and they will confess to anything, statisticians quip …” The Economist
What is one problem
with this approach?
Manipulate the data to see what you want to see (Expect the expected)

12. occupation & family status
Successful stories
7% Customers =
43% Sales
70% more visitors
occupation & family status

13. Yet making most of the data is not easy
Data integrity!
Duplicated, inaccurate, or incomplete records
$1 billion

14. “Dead Data”
“Many new business insights come from “dead data”” The Economist
But now there is a move to real-time data!
Walmart
Li & Fung
Health care
Is real-time data always
better than “dead data”?

15. Cloud Computing
The Internet is used as a platform to collect, store, and process data
No need to build super-computers

16. 73 billion transactions and 36 terabytes of data
R and Hadoop
73 billion transactions and 36 terabytes of data
30 days to 13 minutes

17. Conclusion Health care and (predictive) analytics
Expect the unexpected
Ikea shoppers and ER visits!
Business problem -> collect data -> apply methods -> business goal
Information—a different game
Poptarts and hurricanes!
Data integrity: A $1 billion Nestle transformation
Dead data vs. real-time data
Cloud computing = < computational power need
R & Hadoop: Why not save time & money?
What is business intelligence?

18. What is Business Intelligence?
A broad category of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, accessing, and analyzing data to help business users make better decisions.