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When a recent outbreak of C. difficile – a common intestinal bacteria caused by the use of antibiotics – cropped up at Joseph Brant Memorial Hospital in Burlington, Ont. they had a new tool to help them fight it.

Usually, the hospital staff would've spent hours sifting through Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and patient record charts to determine where the outbreak started.

But now these laborious processes are no more than an unpleasant memory.

That's because an analytics tool from Cary, N.C.-based SAS Institute Inc. ensures data is automatically audited and the answer delivered.

Before staff “weren't able to do the rounds they wanted to and they weren't able to do as many inspections,” says Mark Morreale, manager of decisions support at Joseph Brant. But the SAS pilot project has “increased the ability to do rounds, and staff's [infection] tracing as well.”

It's just one case of a wider trend in Canadian hospitals.

Health care facilities across the country are turning to Business Intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics software to help sort through a disparate patchwork of systems that house volumes of patient data.

To better stretch their resources and track indicators related to provincial funding formulas, hospitals are plugging in more advanced software. They're also looking to it for help when an ageing population poses more healthcare challenges.

The BI trend has caught on like a cold in many industries, healthcare included, says George Goodall, senior research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group. But hospitals have a special kind of advantage.

“What's different about the [healthcare sector] is a lot users are power users,” Goodall says. “You're dealing with a user group that has plenty of experience with advanced tools and isn't afraid of statistical techniques.”

By stealing a page out of the book of the manufacturing industry, healthcare is now looking to exchange data for knowledge on how to use resources more efficiently, he adds.

That's what Toronto-based Bridgepoint Health hopes to do starting today. The specialized, complex chronic care facility becomes the latest amongst more than 50 other hospitals in Ontario to deploy a SAS product.

The BI and Performance Management Platform to interpret data from what used to be a hodge-podge of different systems and formats, says Steve Banyai, chief information officer (CIO) at Bridgepoint.

“When I started here five years ago, we had a chart that showed 123 separate systems,” he says. “It was crazy.”

Now, with a couple of exceptions, that has been consolidated down to just a single implementation.

The single vendor used is Boston, Mass.-based MEDITECH, and SAS software will mine the data. Hospital employees will view the data through a browser-based graphical front-end.

Integrating data from the multiple systems at play in any given hospital is a big pill to swallow, says Pat Finerty, vice-president of alliances and business development at SAS Canada.

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