Every chapter in this text will end with a big data case. Unlike the chapter cases, which feature a wide variety of companies and business scenarios, the big data case will be based mainly on data from a single industry, U.S. hospitals. Drawing from the American Hospital Association database of over 2000 hospitals, we will use business analytics to mine data on these hospitals in different ways for each chapter based on analytics presented in that chapter.

The hospital database features data on 12 variables, thereby offering over 24,000 observations to analyze. Hospital data for each of the 50 states are contained in the database with qualitative data representing state, region of the country, type of ownership, and type of hospital. Quantitative measures include Number of Beds, Number of Admissions, Census, Number of Outpatients, Number of Births, Total Expenditures, Payroll Expenditures, and Personnel.