Business Intelligence vs.

Data Analytics in Health Care

Written by Coursera Staff • Updated on Apr 16, 2024

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Discover what business intelligence and data analytics are, the key
differentiators between these two disciplines, how they apply to the health
care industry, and what types of jobs are available in this space for you to
pursue.

As organizations today handle more data, it is important for them to

effectively manage and analyze the information they come in contact with.
By doing this, they can generate key insights that apply when making critical
business decisions. Specifically in health care, providers rely on business
intelligence and data analytics to locate ways to optimize patient care and
ensure the quality of care given is always high. Leveraging the power of
these disciplines to analyze data can lead to many benefits for health care
organizations, such as improving the efficiency of care, detecting illnesses
sooner, minimizing costs for patients, and improving other critical areas of
health care services and delivery.

Business intelligence and data analytics are both key disciplines

organizations today use to handle their data and generate key insights to aid
in making critical business decisions. While these two terms focus on
achieving similar outcomes, it is important to understand their differentiators
and how to utilize each to tackle challenging business cases. Specific types
of differences to learn about include their purpose, scope, complexity,
granularity, and more. Also, know what kinds of jobs utilize these disciplines
in the health care industry today to see if you want to pursue a health care
analytics career.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence is the process of transforming data, generating

actionable insights through analysis, and building reports and dashboards to
present important takeaways. It enables a company to become data-driven,
collecting and analyzing data from each sector of its business to locate
opportunities and find ways to improve in the future.

You commonly use data visualization tools to create charts and graphs that
showcase trends and insights that can be included on dashboards and
reports. Management can then leverage the information presented from this
analysis to make important decisions about what strategies they deploy and
what trends to pay attention to. The end goal of business intelligence is to
create digestible, easy-to-understand reports to present to key stakeholders
that showcase actionable insights and market trends.

What is data analytics?

Data analytics is a discipline that organizations leverage to gather, organize,

and analyze the unstructured data they encounter to generate key insights.
In data analytics, you use statistics, programming, and other technical and
quantitative skills to find patterns and trends in your data that can lead to
better business decisions about future situations.

A large part of data analytics focuses on predicting future outcomes and

discovering what future trends may be relevant. Effectively using data
analytics in your organization allows you to stay on top of market trends and
have an advantage against competitors in your industry.

Different forms of data analytics exist within the overall discipline, each
focusing on driving specific outcomes for organizations. Four of the main
types of data analysis are:

 Descriptive data analytics: This form of data analytics focuses on

transforming raw, unstructured data into a presentable format that
stakeholders can easily digest. Descriptive analysis looks at data from
the past to find key insights and provide context for broad trends in
your organization.

 Diagnostic data analytics: Diagnostics goes beyond descriptive data

analytics and examines why a trend or change occurred. It is a way to
 analyze the root cause and find the reasons behind a potential
problem.

 Predictive data analytics: Predictive data analytics aims to utilize

past information and data to project what may happen in the future.
Machine learning algorithms and advanced statistical models are used
to help predict future outcomes. These forecasting models become
more powerful and accurate with large sets of available data.

 Prescriptive data analytics: This form of analytics focuses on

enhancing the decision-making process for users. Optimization analysis
is one common example of prescriptive data analytics. Organizations
use prescriptive analytics to help define the steps they need to take to
reach a certain goal.

How do health care professionals rely on data?

Health care professionals rely on data and use business intelligence and data
analytics to extract key information, perform analysis, and generate reports
and visualizations showcasing important metrics and outcomes. Compared to
other industries, health care organizations have taken longer to adopt
business intelligence and data analytics to enhance their work, but these
disciplines are acting as a catalyst in transforming the industry for the
future.

A study released by MarketsandMarkets states that the projected growth rate

for the US health care analytics market is over 25 percent each year from
2022 to 2027 [1]. Effectively utilizing data in health care enables you to
improve the management of key processes and procedures and enhance
your ability to make difficult decisions. The main uses of business
intelligence and data analytics in health care fall into two different buckets:
discovery and delivery.

Discovery benefits, also called efficacy benefits, relate to disease detection,

comparative effectiveness, and information sharing through storing data in
centralized databases, among other things. An example of this is the chronic
disease database, which promotes an ideal learning health system (LHS)
where data gathered from every patient contributes to a database.
Organizations that contribute to the database benefit from leveraging its
information to improve the care for their patients and allow them to promote
knowledge sharing across different teams.
Care delivery benefits include optimizing the flow of patients receiving care,
using dashboards and charts to track key metrics related to the care
received by a patient, and disaster planning. Dashboards and control charts
in health care have applications in tracking operational metrics within an
office or hospital and monitoring critical recovery metrics like remission rate.
Various other ways that health care professionals rely on data include:

 Minimizing the cost of treatments

 Improving key processes, such as inventory management

 Managing the revenue cycle

 Locating preventative care opportunities

 Monitoring patient preferences

 Reducing wait times for patients

 Enabling earlier disease detection

Business intelligence vs. data analytics: Differentiators

While it is common to hear the terms business intelligence and data

analytics used interchangeably, it is important to recognize their
differentiators and some of the key factors behind each discipline.

Scope

The scope of data analytics is broader than that of business intelligence.

Data analytics incorporates finding valuable insights through a wide range of
methods, such as statistics, visualizations, and other exploratory methods.
Business intelligence usually analyzes an organization's performance for a
specific situation to find trends and information that help stakeholders make
informed choices.

Techniques

Business intelligence techniques include using data visualization tools,

reports, and dashboards to organize and present the analysis results. Within
data analytics, techniques commonly used for analysis are machine learning,
data mining, prediction analysis, and programming. These techniques tend
to be less beginner-friendly than business intelligence tools.

Purpose
In general, the main purpose behind business intelligence and data analytics
differ. Business intelligence aims to generate insights from information and
data that aid in making business decisions within an organization. For data
analytics, the main purpose is to discover key trends and patterns within
data that inform predictions about future outcomes.

Time frame

Data analytics operates under a longer time frame to analyze past

information and generate forecasts about future opportunities and
strategies. Business intelligence focuses on a shorter timeline to provide
real-time data and insights to stakeholders to help inform their decision-
making.

Types of data

Data analytics works with complex data sets ingested from various sources
that can sometimes be unstructured. The techniques and tools used in data
analysis allow you to handle this type of data. Business intelligence,
however, commonly performs analysis from data stored in a database from
its organization. These data sets are often already organized, cleansed, and
structured before business intelligence begins.

Complexity

As you can see from the types of techniques and data relevant to each
discipline, data analytics tends to be more complex, requiring a specific set
of skills and knowledge of techniques, such as programming. While some
training may be necessary to start with business intelligence, this discipline
is more accessible and requires less specialized skills.

Data volume

Business intelligence works with smaller, more manageable data sets

compared to data analytics. However, both disciplines have ties to big data
applications so that the data volume may vary depending on the specific
situation. Data analytics frequently handles large quantities of data and
requires data storage and scaling knowledge.

Granularity

Business intelligence and the associated dashboards created through this

type of analysis feature more high-level information derived from an
organization's data. Data analytics investigates data sets further to extract
unobvious insights and gain in-depth knowledge about relevant trends.
Careers in health care using business intelligence and data analytics

Employers in health care today are actively looking for professionals with a
data analysis skill set and a strong understanding of business intelligence
fundamentals. A few of the top in-demand health care careers related to
business intelligence and data analytics include:

Clinical data analyst

Average annual US salary: $88,330 [2]

Job demand growth: 35 percent from 2022 to 2032 [3]

Clinical data analysts focus on verifying and validating the information

discovered from trials and experiments in a clinical setting. They utilize data
analysis and business intelligence to build databases, manage data sets to
maintain accuracy, and report the takeaways from their analysis of the data
to key stakeholders to provide insights that improve the quality of health
care options.

Population health data analyst

Average annual US salary: $82,517 [4]

Job demand growth: 35 percent from 2022 to 2032 [3]

As a population health data analyst, you leverage data analysis skills to

analyze vast data sets to discover new business solutions for your
organization in health care. You commonly collect your data or interpret
studies to build your data sets, develop algorithms or predictive models,
discover processes to improve health data sets and ensure the performance
and accuracy of your data model are optimized to deliver valuable insights.

Data scientist

Average annual US salary: $120,588 [5]

Job demand growth: 35 percent from 2022 to 2032 [3]

Specifically in the health care industry, data scientists utilize techniques in

data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other disciplines to
find valuable insights within health care data sets. The analysis you complete
as a data scientist in health care aims to enhance the care patients receive,
bolster self-tracking capabilities for patients, contribute to the research and
treatment options of illnesses, and improve the efficiency of key processes
throughout your organization overall.
Health information management analyst

Average annual US salary: $80,647 [6]

Job demand growth: 10 percent from 2022 to 2032 [7]

As a health information management analyst, you collect and analyze

diverse data sources related to health. You are responsible for gathering data
to build dashboards and reports that showcase your findings to key
stakeholders. Other tasks you may complete in this role include researching
new data collection techniques, incorporating automation into your analysis,
and serving as a resource for your organization to train other employees
about data collection.

Health care business intelligence analyst

Average annual US salary: $88,359 [8]

Job demand growth: 10 percent from 2022 to 2032 [7]

Health care business intelligence analysts leverage the capabilities of

business intelligence software to work with data sets and create data
visualizations to showcase key insights. The information you work with in this
position can relate to clinical, financial, operational, and even other types of
data ingested by your organization. Your work improves patient care, locates
critical trends related to the spread of diseases or demographic information,
and provides valuable context to management to improve overall decision-
making.

Health care business intelligence developer

Average annual US salary: $86,473 [9]

Job demand growth: 10 percent from 2022 to 2032 [7]

Your goals in this position align with those of a health care business
intelligence analyst; however, you focus on creating and maintaining critical
business intelligence infrastructure used by your organization to manage
data. The systems and tools you handle in a developer role include data
models, various reporting services, dashboards, and graphs and charts built
from your data.

Common tools used in business intelligence and data analytics

Business intelligence and data analytics professionals utilize specific tools to
complete their duties. Data analytics requires a strong knowledge of
analytical techniques and data-related technical abilities. You need to know
statistics, data mining, and even some programming languages in this
discipline. Common tools used in data analytics include SQL, Python, and R.

Business intelligence demands a slightly different skill set that is less

technical and more tailored to visualizing data and showcasing the critical
information derived from analysis. In a business intelligence role, you
commonly build charts, graphs, and other data visualizations to develop
dashboards and other reports to present key insights to your organization.
Common business intelligence tools to know are Microsoft Excel and popular
business intelligence software, like Microsoft Power BI and Tableau.

Getting started on Coursera

To learn more about business intelligence, data analytics, and the common
tools and software utilized by professionals in these disciplines, completing a
course or receiving a relevant Professional Certificate is a great place to
start. On Coursera, you can enroll in some of the top courses in the world.

Check out the Google Business Intelligence Professional Certificate. This

certificate course series features three courses that allow you to earn a
career credential demonstrating your business intelligence expertise.
Through this program, you can learn in-demand skills required to land a
business intelligence role today, such as data modeling, reporting,
dashboarding, and visualization.

If you are interested in pursuing a career path more related to data analytics,
check out the Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst Professional Certificate. This
certificate program features the ability for you to learn the most in-demand
business intelligence skills to prepare you to attain a job in this field within
five months. You can learn how to connect data sources, transform your data,
and how to prepare Excel data for analysis.

professional certificate

Google Business Intelligence

Learn in-demand skills like data modeling, data visualization, and
dashboarding and reporting in less than 2 months.

4.8

(2,229 ratings)

107,758 already enrolled

Advanced level

Learn More

Average time: 2 month(s)

Learn at your own pace

Skills you'll build:

Business Intelligence, Extraction, Transformation And Loading (ETL),

Bigquery, Dashboarding and Reporting, Data Analysis, Data Modeling,
Business Analysis, SQL, Tableau Software, Business Process, Sheets, Data
Visualization, Effective Communication, Presenting Data Insights, Data
transformation, Data Management, Database Optimization, Google
Dataflow/Google BigQuery, Business Processes and Requirements, Sharing
Insights With Stakeholders, Stakeholder Management, Cross-Functional Team
Dynamics, Asking Effective Questions

professional certificate

Microsoft Power BI Data Analyst

Launch your career as a Power BI analyst. Build job-ready skills – and must-
have AI skills – for an in-demand career. Earn a credential from Microsoft. No
prior experience required.

4.6

(5,927 ratings)

266,680 already enrolled

Beginner level

Learn More
Average time: 5 month(s)

Learn at your own pace

Skills you'll build:

Generative AI in Power BI, Data Analysis, Microsoft Excel, SQL, power bi,
Power Query, Data Visualization, Design Reports, Design Dashboards, Report
Building, Dashboard Creation, Data-driven decisions, Preparing Data,
formulas and functions, Data Management, Security Alerting, Data
transformation, Data Configuration, Data Modeling, DAX

Article sources

1.

Markets and Markets. “USA Healthcare Analytics Market is expected to grow

at a CAGR of 25.7%,
https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/PressReleases/usa-healthcare-
analytics.asp.” Accessed March 26, 2024.