Network analytics to enable decisions in healthcare management

For most people, "healthcare system" often means the process of receiving treatment from a general practitioner (GP), a specialist, or the hospital. It is true that the main goal of a well-structured healthcare system is to provide the best possible care to its consumers; however, underlying the front-end service of hospitals, GPs, or other providers, an enormous network of people, organizations, funders, and stakeholders work together to keep the whole healthcare system running smoothly. All of these healthcare entities generate a large amount of data, which become valuable resources that help understand how the whole system is performing. As these entities and the data they generate are inherently connected, network analysis has a significant potential to offer insights into the hidden relationships across these data elements, which in turn can influence both cost and quality of healthcare. This chapter provides some basic network-based concepts and analytical measures that can be computed from healthcare data. It further describes some healthcare applications, where network analytics can provide insights to healthcare managers for evidence-based decisions.