Creating knowledge-driven healthcare processes with the Intelligence Continuum

Medical science has made revolutionary changes in the past few decades. Contemporaneously, however, healthcare has made incremental changes at best. One area within healthcare that best exemplifies this is the operating room (OR). The growing discrepancy between the revolutionary changes in medicine and the minimal changes in healthcare processes leads to inefficient and ineffective healthcare deliver and one if not the significant contributor to the exponentially increasing costs plaguing healthcare globally. Significant quantities of data and information permeate the healthcare industry, yet the healthcare industry has not maximised this data resource by fully embracing key business management processes or techniques (such as Knowledge Management (KM), data mining, Business Intelligence (BI) or Business Analytics (BA)) to capitalise on realising the full value of this data/information resource to reengineer processes. The Intelligence Continuum (IC), a Mobius strip of sophisticated tools, techniques and process provides a systematic mechanism for healthcare organisations to facilitate superior clinical practice and administrative management. In this paper, the case example of the orthopaedic OR is used to illustrate the power of the IC in effecting more efficient and effective healthcare processes to ensue and thereby enabling healthcare to make evolutionary changes.