Developing and Organizing an Analytics Capability for Patient Flow in a General Hospital

Abstract

Much of the information produced in hospitals is clinical, and stored for the purposes of documentation. In practice, most of it is never used. The potential of analytics is to reuse this information for other purposes. This is easier said than done, because of technical, semantic, legal and organizational hindrances. In particular, hospitals are not organized to leverage the value of big data. In this study we ask, how can we conceptualize analytics as an integrated part of hospital processes? And, how can we develop and organize an analytics capability in a large hospital? Our empirical evidence is a longitudinal study in a high-tech hospital in Norway, where we followed the development of an analytics capability, and assessed the organizational benefits. We offer two findings. First, we show how the analytics process interacts with the hospital logistics processes in a sense- and respond cycle. Second, we demonstrate how analytics capability is built on the institutionalized network of technology, an analytics team and the administrative and clinical decision makers.