Data mining of hospital characteristics in online publication of medical quality information

Victor B. Kreng, Shao-Wei Yang^*

Department of Industrial and Information Management, National Cheng Kung University, Tainan.

DOI: 10.4236/health.2013.55123                

Abstract

Information disclosure can reduce information asymmetry between health care providers and patients, thus improving both patient safety and medical quality. The National Bureau of Health Insurance (NBHI) inTaiwancurrently publishes health-related information online in order to enhance service efficiency and enable the public to monitor the country’s medical system. A data mining technique, classification and regression tree (CART), is used in this work to investigate online public quality information to compare the characteristics of hospital. The hospital quality indicators and characteristics data are available on the websites of the NBHI
(http://www.nhi.gov.tw/AmountInfoWeb/Index.aspx) and the Department of Health
(http://www.doh.gov.tw/). The full classification and regression tree presented in this work, grown using the hospitals’ quality medical indicators and characteristic values, classifies all hospitals into seven groups. The rate of stays longer than 30 days, which is the dependent variable in this study, is most influenced by the number of medical staff. This reflects the fact that the fewer medical staffs that are employed, the smaller the hospital is, and patients who are likely to have longer stays tend to go to the medium or large hospitals. Policy makers should work to decrease or eliminate persistent healthcare disparities among different socioeconomic groups and offer more online healthrelated services to reduce information asymmetry between health care providers and patients.

Keywords

Hospital Characteristics; Data Mining; Classification and Regression Tree; Information Disclosure

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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