Business Intelligence in Radiation Oncology: About Potential and Limits

Background: Business intelligence (BI) solutions are nowadays offered as part of radiation oncology information systems. They support state-of-the-art extraction of structured data for business and research use cases. The variety of use cases often comes with specific customizations for which IT experts are required. Summary: We report about our experience in implementing a BI module in a radiation oncology department, discuss key challenges, and give some recommendations for addressing them. Key Messages: The effectivity of a BI solution strongly interacts with the diverse IT ecosystem of the hospital. It is worth starting with concrete business requirements and involve IT experts from the hospital data warehouse (DWH) or architecture teams. Integration into the enterprise DWH will add value to secondary use of data in the line of good clinical practices.