Healthcare has now become digitalized. Its digitalization has opened new horizons to enhance the quality of care, improve healthcare outcomes while reducing cost of care. In fact it has enabled a 360-degree Patient management system due to integration of electronic health records (EHRs), videos, medical images, medical claims, scanned documents, and physicians’ notes. Moreover it has not been limited to internal source only. Incorporation of social, demographic, environmental, and behavioral information about patients from various external sources has helped the organizations in finding new correlations that might otherwise have remained hidden.
This has created a lot of data and has forced the healthcare industry to move from paper to digital health records. This digitalization has allowed healthcare industry to leverage various tools and technologies for analysis of the available data and generate valuable insights. This clearly suggests that the era of big data has arrived in healthcare.
The volume, variety, and velocity of big data is huge and healthcare organizations must adopt new analytics solutions and robust infrastructures to produce valuable insights from it. A healthcare organization must follow the following steps to introduce robust analytics to meet their data needs:
- Make an end-to-end strategy: For success of any new idea, it is very important to make a strategy that should extend from starting to the end. So the first step should be to identify all the existing problems that have been difficult to address, as well as problems that have never been addressed. Moving forward, there should be a discussion between the IT persons, healthcare bodies and other stakeholders to clearly set the objectives, identify critical success factors, and make relevant decisions. This discussion and the decisions made from this discussion would prove to be the stepping stones of Big data analytics.
- Identify the best software and hardware solutions: As the data is huge and from various structured and unstructured sources, the software and hardware solutions must be best in the industry that can easily analyse big data in healthcare context.
- Define use cases: Use cases must be developed in order to identify right solutions and create best strategies to achieve them. This is majorly done by the IT team. They should make important decisions like:
- map out data flows
- what data to include and leave
- evaluate relationship between different pieces of information
- identify the business rules related to data
- evaluate requirement of real-time results
- define the analytical queries and algorithms for generation of the desired outputs
- Identify gaps between current and future capabilities: Now the main question arises. This is to identify the present scenario and look for the future requirements related to data. The IT needs answers to certain questions like:
- What collecting, cleansing and accumulating qualities of data are required?
- What are the regulatory requirements and data governance policies that should be followed?
- What are the infrastructure requirements in terms of scalability, low latency, and performance?
- How to make data understandable and easily accessible to business and clinical users?
- Test environment: Now after all these efforts, finally a test environment needs to be created by the IT groups to define the presentation and analytics application layers of the big data. Simultaneously a data warehousing environment should also be created. If required, a private- or public-based cloud data management can also be created.
Opportunities extended by insights created by Big data analytics
Application of analytics to big data open doors for following opportunities within the healthcare:
- Improve health outcomes while reducing the costs
- Healthcare payers and providers can use these new insights in improving their marketing of various products and services
- Enhance the experience of patients
- Help organizations in better communication with healthcare consumers
- Streamline clinical workflows
- Optimize care
- Strengthen the doctor-patient relationships
Finally, it can be clearly stated that Big data can create a more efficient and effective healthcare industry that will provide improved outcomes and greater patient management system.
Matt Wilson
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