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Keywords
Data management, Integration technology, Relational databases, Health care, Information management
Abstract
In a dynamic and uncertain business environment, with increasingly intense competition and vibrant globalisation, there is a growing demand by healthcare businesses for both internal and external information, to analyse patients` information quickly and efficiently, which has led healthcare organisations to embrace customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Data quality and data integration issues facilitate the achievement of CRM business objectives. Data quality is the state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness and accuracy that makes data appropriate for CRM business exploitation. A good integration strategy begins with a thorough data assessment study, and relies upon the quality of these data. A framework is proposed for evaluating the quality and integration of patient data for CRM applications in the health care sector. Even though this framework is in an early stage of development, it intends to present existing solutions for evaluating the above issues.
Introduction
Customer relationship management (CRM) solutions emerged a decade ago in response to the competitive pressures that globalisation and other forms of cross-industry, crossgeography competition were bringing about (IBM Publications, 2001). Since then the world has been on the threshold of a shift from a transaction-based economy to a relationship-based economy, and businesses have changed from being product-driven to customer-driven (Kalakota and Robinson, 1999; Dye, 2000; Newell, 2000).
The initial CRM applications, put in place during the early 1990s, were solutions like sales force automation (SFA) and customer service support (CSS). These departmentbased solutions enhanced specific business processes, but failed to give companies an overall view of their relationship with individual customers (IBM Publications, 2001). In response, CRM software developers began in the mid-1990s to assemble these applications into cross-functional CRM solutions that melded internal data and processes like lead generation, sales tracking, outbound marketing, and customer service requests into a single operational system.
As the 1990s came to their close, the concept of customer relationship management was just beginning to penetrate beyond the early corporate adopters. IBM surveys (IBM Publications, 2001) revealed that most organisations, particularly small and medium sized businesses, had only a general understanding of the utility of customer relationship management, and knew little about specific solutions. And while most of these firms collected...