The statistics were telling: 15 per cent to 20 per cent of neurosurgery patients developed infections in the drains that neurosurgeons implanted to draw away fluids, a complication that not only threatened lives, but also led to hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment costs annually.

Dr. Daniel Stalhammar, a neurosurgeon for 40 years, believed his hospital, Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, could do better. He turned to computers for help.

That may not be surprising, but his choice of IT tools is: Stalhammar picked business intelligence software to improve patient outcomes and ultimately save lives.

"I needed to handle large databases and have tools to make proper decisions on which patients were to be selected for specialized and very expensive care," he says.

Stalhammar used QlikTech International's QlikView to analyze multiple databases containing patient information against established medical measurements and likely outcomes. This tool has helped the hospital reduce its rate of medical complications, sparing patients any additional pain and problems and eliminating the need for many costly tests and treatments.

"Certainly, [this accomplishment] would be possible without technology, but that would take a lot of work [from] several people working continuously. That costs a lot, and it is very difficult to keep performance 24 hours a day on the highest level. There will be mistakes, misunderstandings, etc., resulting in repeated failures," says Stalhammar. "By automatic alerts provided by QlikView, this will simply not happen."

This innovative use of QlikView software earned QlikTech International and Stalhammar's project a victory in the Business & Related Services category in the US Computerworld Honors Program.

To be sure, Stalhammar was no stranger to using software prior to implementing the BI application. He had used other IT tools, such as Excel, to help sort and analyze data. And he had worked on computerizing patient records at his hospital.

Such experiences, he says, allowed him to recognize how computers could help doctors make critical decisions by providing them with analysis of information that they just couldn't access quickly enough through manual systems. And when he saw another hospital using QlikView, he saw the possibilities that this particular application could bring to his own medical work.