The data you collect about your patients is one of the greatest assets that any business has available. Buried within the data is all sorts of valuable information that could make a significant difference to the way you run your business and interact with your patients. But how can you discover it?

This IBM Redbook focuses on a specific industry sector, the health care sector, and explains how IBM DB2 Intelligent Miner for Data (IM for Data) is the solution that will allow you to mine your own business.

This redbook is one of a family of redbooks that has been designed to address the types of business issues that can be solved by data mining in different industry sectors. The other redbooks address the retail, banking, and telecoms sectors.

Using specific examples for health care, this book will help medical personnel to understand the sorts of business issues that data mining can address, how to interpret the mining results, and how to deploy them in health care. Medical personnel will want to skip certain sections of the book, such as “The data to be used”, “Sourcing and preprocessing the data”, and “Evaluating the data”.

This book will also help implementers to understand how a generic mining method can be applied. This generic method describes how to translate the business issues into a data mining problem and some common data models that you can use. It explains how to choose the appropriate data mining technique and then how to interpret and deploy the results.

Although no in-depth knowledge of Intelligent Miner for Data is required, a basic understanding of data mining technology is assumed.