Enabling Business Intelligence Functions over a Loosely Coupled Environment

Abstract

Planning effective and well targeted actions to manage and improve the local and national healthcare services requires institutions to understand and analyse the real needs of the population based on reliable and timely statistical analysis on citizens’ health state. This is particularly important in developing countries in which healthcare facilities lack ICT infrastructures and network connectivity, making data collection and analysis particularly difficult with a considerable manual effort leading to potentially unreliable or incoherent information. In this scenario, we propose a generic communication infrastructure, developed in the SIS-H project for Mozambique hospitals to capture, communicate and analyse clinical events. Our solution enables the exchange of data amongst healthcare facilities over all the different aggregation levels of the hierarchical healthcare system of Mozambique regardless of the availability of communication media (e.g., compact disk, usb stick, web-internet). The plugin-based solution adopted supports reporting and Business Intelligence analysis for exploring data at different granularity levels.