Data mining and predictive analytics applications for the delivery of healthcare services: a systematic literature review

With the widespread use of healthcare information systems commonly known as electronic health records, there is significant scope for improving the way healthcare is delivered by resorting to the power of big data. This has made data mining and predictive analytics an important tool for healthcare decision making. The literature has reported attempts for knowledge discovery from the big data to improve the delivery of healthcare services, however, there appears no attempt for assessing and synthesizing the available information on how the big data phenomenon has contributed to better outcomes for the delivery of healthcare services. This paper aims to achieve this by systematically reviewing the existing body of knowledge to categorize and evaluate the reported studies on healthcare operations and data mining frameworks. The outcome of this study is useful as a reference for the practitioners and as a research platform for the academia.