Hi Susan,

We published two papers recently in the BI directions:

They are:

1. Kuo A, Sahama TR, Kushniruk AW, Borycki E, Grunwell DK, (2014) Health big data analytics: Current perspectives, challenges and potential solutions, International Journal of Big Data Intelligence

2. Narra, Lekha, Sahama, Tony, & Stapleton, Peta (2015) Clinical data warehousing : a business analytics approach for managing health data. In Maeder, Anthony & Warren, Jim (Eds.) Proceedings of the Eighth Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM2015), Australian Computer Society, Sydney, Australia. 

I'm sure you can download those papers from this http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Sahama,_Tony.html link.

Tony

Hi, Susan, couldn't find this kind of studies in the PubMed. However, during the literature search, an interesting article by Feng L et al from the National University of Singapore, appears. Share it with you.

I am not aware of any study yet, but my impression is that business intelligence and analytics, big data...are increasingly used. It seems that IT experts/Data experts are taking some part of epidemiologist's job! Dear @Susan, I will try to find some facts about my country!

Please, have a look into attached link! "The workshop brings together researchers from epidemiology, data science, computational science and health IT domains to tap the potential of emerging technologies in data intensive computations and analytical processing to advance the state of art in computational epidemiology. Computational epidemiology aims to understand the spread of diseases and efficient strategies to mitigate their outbreak."

http://www.vbi.vt.edu/ndssl/upcoming-events/upcoming-events-view/bdce-2014-first-ieee-international-workshop-on-big-data-in-computational-ep

Hi Susan,

We published two papers recently in the BI directions:

They are:

1. Kuo A, Sahama TR, Kushniruk AW, Borycki E, Grunwell DK, (2014) Health big data analytics: Current perspectives, challenges and potential solutions, International Journal of Big Data Intelligence

2. Narra, Lekha, Sahama, Tony, & Stapleton, Peta (2015) Clinical data warehousing : a business analytics approach for managing health data. In Maeder, Anthony & Warren, Jim (Eds.) Proceedings of the Eighth Australasian Workshop on Health Informatics and Knowledge Management (HIKM2015), Australian Computer Society, Sydney, Australia. 

I'm sure you can download those papers from this http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Sahama,_Tony.html link.

Tony

Working as a clinical epidemiologist within the confines of primarily an Emergency Department, I have become increasingly attracted to the field of Business Intelligence and its appeal in addressing some of the issues inherently faced on the front lines of acute care provision. I have yet to find any publication that specifically deal with your question - and I believe there is yet not enough people who have successfully traverse the two fields.  My personal feeling is that even though the source data is common, the perspectives of the approach are different - clinical epidemiologists would focus on the research question and how best to marry the research method and data to address the question whilst ensuring bias is well controlled; BI is very much linked to decision making, and how amalgamated well analyzed data can help provide the best direction in decisions with the highest optimum predicted outcome that would yield the intended performance - in other words, benchmarks, metrics and the bottom line.

Thanks all, for the insights and references, which are all interesting. I like the observation that the two fields use the same data source but have slightly different perspectives. In the end though, I think clinical epidemiology is also about decision making although it is often at a higher level or more strategic than BI, which is very practical in focus.

As much as I would like to agree with you Susan, I think BI experts may argue otherwise on  who is actually higher or more strategic. What remains clear is the different lenses each discipline use to tackle the data and harness the wisdom within. Our world in clinical evidence and the industry that generates it is grounded in addressing uncertainties and replacing it with an arbitrary concept of statistical significance linked to outcomes and risks. I think BI and Big Data Analytics from a commercial sense focuses more on trends, validity of predictive models and forecasting the maximisation of outcomes of business strategies. Both are very practical, but for different reasons. 

I am constantly reminded when I see my Business Process colleagues in action that they don't actually understand the nature of medical/epidemiological data. Same goes for Big Data, there are some significant differences from Big Data coming from web pages, twitter and facebook, business data coming from transactions, and the medical data. In addition, there is the 'close enough' attitude of data scientists that contrasts greatly with the 'absolutely accurate' attitude of medical professionals. In particular, how to handle missing data (which always reminds me of the "Missing Link" in Evolution which has always been more missing chain than link!).

BI however has many useful tools to use to use in the Epidemiology sphere, in that it can point out previously unrealised correlation and trends. But confirmation of these will probably not occur in BI analysis, unless pure datasets are used to start with. And there are so few of these!

Dear @Susan, I was reading some of your papers that covers this emerging issue. Clinical informatics will never be the same. I have found a book regarding this issue.

Healthcare Informatics and Analytics: Emerging Issues and Trends.

Maybe You have already experienced this book?

https://books.google.rs/books?id=JxqXBQAAQBAJ&dq=clinical+epidemiology+practices+and+Business+Intelligence+and+Analytics&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Thank you Ljubomir, that is a very useful reference and also because the authors happen to come from a nearby university! Thanks for the great resource.