This is changing, however. The medical community has become much more sophisticated as well as more accepting of technology. Still a lot of Paper META estimates that the typical chart, or patient record, is only 40 percent electronic today. In fact, the digital components to the chart, such as lab results and pharmacy orders are typically printed out and appended to the paper record. Each patient record can contain as many as 26,000 attributes.
Obstacles do exist to the widespread adoption of data mining tools in the healthcare field.
The industry is unique in several ways. Its fragmentation makes it still very much a cottage industry of relatively small providers of services. But the 'providers' are only one-half of the picture. The 'payers' are the large insurance companies that in the end pay for treatment. The problem is that most data mining vendors do not know how to market to healthcare.