What Is Big Data in Healthcare?

Three characteristics distinguish it from traditional electronic medical and human health data used for decision-making: It is available in extraordinarily high volume; it moves at high velocity and spans the health industry's massive digital universe; and, because it derives from many sources, it is highly variable in structure and nature. This is known as the 3Vs of Big Data.

 

 

With its diversity in format, type, and context, it isn't easy to merge big healthcare data into conventional databases, making it enormously challenging to process and harden industry leaders to harness its significant promise to transform the industry.

"Despite these challenges, several new technological improvements are allowing big healthcare data to be converted into useful, actionable information."

Despite these challenges, several new technological improvements allow big healthcare data to be converted into useful, actionable information. By leveraging appropriate software tools, big data informs the movement toward value-based healthcare and is opening the door to remarkable advancements, even while reducing costs. With the wealth of information that healthcare data analytics provides, caregivers and administrators can now make better medical and financial decisions while still delivering an ever-increasing quality of patient care.

 

 

Adopting big data analysis in healthcare has lagged behind other industries due to challenges such as privacy of health information, security, siloed data, and budget constraints. In the meantime, 80 percent of executives from financial services, insurance, media, entertainment, manufacturing, and logistics companies surveyed report their investments in big data processing as "successful," and more than one in five declare their significant data initiatives have been "transformational" for their firms.

 

 

There are at least two trends today that encourage the healthcare industry to embrace big data. The first is the move above from a pay-for-service model, which financially rewards caregivers for performing procedures, to a value-based care model, which rewards them based on their patient populations' health. Healthcare data analytics will enable the measurement and tracking of population health, thereby allowing this switch. The second trend involves using big data analysis to deliver evidence-based information and will, over time, increase efficiencies and help sharpen our understanding of the best practices associated with any disease, injury, or illness.

 

 

"Using big data analysis to deliver information that is evidence-based will, over time, increase efficiencies and help sharpen our understanding of the best practices associated with any disease, injury, or illness."

Undoubtedly, adopting big healthcare data can transform the industry, driving it away from a fee-for-service model toward value-based care. In short, it can deliver on the promise of lowering healthcare costs while revealing ways to provide superior patient experiences, treatments, and outcomes.

 

 

Applications for Big Data in Healthcare

Keeping patients healthy and avoiding illness and disease stands at the front of any priority list. Consumer products like the Fitbit activity tracker and the Apple Watch keep tabs on individuals' physical activity levels and can also report on specific health-related trends. The resulting data is already being sent to cloud servers, providing information to physicians who use it as part of their overall health and wellness programs.

Big data is defined as a massive volume of high velocity, complex and variable data that need innovative techniques to enable the data or information capture, storing, dissemination, management, and analysis. ...