Patient intelligence

Patient Intelligence (PI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help an organization acquire a better understanding of its position in the healthcare context. Patient Intelligence may also refer to the collected information of the patients itself.

PI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of current situation regarding behavior and intentions of persons suffering from a disorder, disease and/or complaint. Common functions of patient intelligence applications are reporting, analytics, health economic models, business performance management, benchmarks, patient brochures validation and predictive analytics.

Patient Intelligence often aims to support better decision-making in the healthcare environment. Thus a PI system can be called a decision support system (DSS).

'The greatest potential benefits from involving patients, as distinct from the public,would lie in improving the effectiveness of care and treatment through transforming the interaction between patients and health professionals.'

Definition

Patient Intelligence (PI) is the ways in which we collect and use patient information. It encompasses the technologies, applications, and means for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting patient data AbOUT beliefs and understanding of health status. The research outcomes can be used to report past patient information as well as predict future patient information, including trends, threats, opportunities and patterns. Companies often need to outsource Patient Intelligence research as legal aspects do not allow them to contact patients directly. And designing proper quantitative and/or qualitative research projects and implementing them can be quite complex!

History

In 2008, researcher Drs Nadine van Dongen used the term patient intelligence. After doing research for pharmaceutical companies on patient intelligence, she committed herself to make a change in the healthcare environment as the patient should be at the heart of the focus of all organisations in healthcare, so she introduced this new term into the healthcare environment in 2009. Today she is writing articles and a book on this subject.