The entities in charge of the administration, attention
and regulation of the subsidized healthcare services
have a, even greater, responsibility of identifying the
users of the health system, without making any
mistakes. The information registered in the DB is
necessary for accessing the government funds that
covers the health plan of a subsidized patient. Thus,
the local government entities of control and
monitoring, periodically make revisions of the data
registered in the information systems and check for
inconsistencies reported with regards to subsidized
users.
Given the actual situation, the information
system plays an important role in guaranteeing the
stability of the healthcare system. DBs are a key
element in the administration of the information of
users in the subsidized healthcare system. In order to
guarantee that the system counts with complete and
clean data (information free of errors), several DBs
of users must be integrated, such as, the DB that
contains the deceased, the new affiliations, the
withdrawals, the transferred, among others. This
integration must be done at a timely basis given that
periodically there must be a report and the efficiency
of the system must be maintained. DM is considered
for this matter, given that it involves techniques and
algorithms that allow correct and optimal
management of DBs, as well as the use of
information to gain knowledge over the population
involved.
This research takes into account a point of view
of the problem described above with respect to the
correct identification and administration of
inconsistencies in the registered data in the
healthcare system. Particularly, this research
identifies DM as an appropriate tool used for the
timely detection of inconsistencies by many
information systems. While some believe that DM is
a robust and complex tool to be used for the
detection of duplicities in the DB registrations in any
information system, we believe it’s completely
necessary in order to get clean data and at the same
time, obtain new knowledge from the data and a
profound analysis of its behavior with respect to the
abnormalities presented, that can become
compelling to the overall quality of the system.
The paper is organized as follows: On section 2,
a the state of art in DM applied to the Health Sector
is given, supported by some applications with
respect to duplicity detection on DBs; section 3,
presents the case study developed, Unique
Identification System for Users (SIUU) for the
Health Sector, and guidelines of the solution are
proposed; then, on section 4, Advantages and
Disadvantages of DM in a SIUU, shows the
importance of the DM for the detection of
duplicities, patients’ needs and the complexity of the
solution; the last section presents concluding
remarks and considerations to take into account
when implementing the project.
2 DATA MINING APPLIED TO
THE HEALTH SECTOR
A DB is a set of data that belong to the same context
and are stored in a structural way for its further use
(Date and Date, 1990). A DB provides institutions
the access to information, in a way that it can be
visualized, managed and updated, according to the
access rights given (Batra, Parashar, Sachdeva, and
Mehndiratta, 2013). With respect to the case study
developed under this research, the DB identified as
FOSYGA (MinSalud, 2014) is in charge of storing
the Colombian healthcare information system with
respect to the affiliation information. This DM
provides access to sensitive information of the users
registered in the system, which represents close to
91,69% of the entire Colombian population (DANE,
2013).
One of the most wearying activities to be done in
terms of the administration of information is to keep
the DB updated. In the Colombian healthcare
subsidized system (RSS), local authorities must
guarantee that the data updated is free of errors,
since the payment given for the healthcare attention
of a user that no longer belongs to the system is
absorbed by the entities that offer the service and are
not benefitting any other users. The identification of
multiple registrations in this type of DB allows for a
correct use of the government funds for healthcare
services.
This same issue has been identified and
approached in other countries, such as New Zealand,
England, Spain, among others. In these countries,
they have created a unique identification system for
patients and have established some technological
and legal frameworks in order to support and
regulate the processes of affiliation and registration
of patients in the system (Oviedo and Fernández,
2010).Yet, the problem is still present with or
without the implementation of a unique identifica-
tion system, given that the DB must be integrated
and the data must be clean in order to use this
information in the decision making process. DM has
been approached to solve this issue, given that it
gives the controlling entities the capacity to
automatically classify and correct errors in the data.
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