How Big Data is Creating New Models of Healthcare

Business leaders of the 21st century must be aware of technology trends and understand the impact on their business. The healthcare industry faces continuing challenges from an increasingly older population with higher treatment costs and increased demand for better services along with higher expectations for delivery. Big data technologies promise is to increase profits, cut overhead, help deliver high quality services, better treatments, improve quality of life, and avoid deaths that can be prevented. Advances in storage, computational efficiency, new algorithms, network security monitoring and speeds, and easy to use applications allow extremely large data sets to be analyzed to reveal patterns, associations, and trends that generate insights that leaders use in making decisions that could improve healthcare for all of us.
The world’s population is continually increasing as well as the percentage of people 50 and older in most of the world. Like any other industry, healthcare must respond to these pressures by delivering new, more efficient and less costly models of treatment. In a rapidly changing world of regulations, governmental policies, and technological advances, the decisions to keep up and improve are being driven by data. This data must come from the patients where the goal is to understand as much about them as possible, as early in their life as possible, and to be analyzed as quickly as possible. The hope is to pick up warning signs of impending disease or serious illness early enough to provide a simpler and more effective treatment at a lower cost.
Today’s big data sources
Most of us have smartphones where we have installed applications to help manage our health. Examples of the most popular applications are pedometers to take count of how many steps we walked in a day or calories counters to watch our diet. Millions of us rely on mobile technologies and the data it collects to help us live better, happier, longer, and more productive lives. We can choose to share our collected health data alongside everyone else’s to compare and to track progress against goals to get encouragement.
Today, or in the near future, you can also share this data with your doctor to become part of his or her toolbox providing you with preventive diagnosis, recommendations, and treatment effectiveness evaluation. Even if you are young and healthy, for medical professionals having access to those huge and continually growing databases of general public health information will allow health issues to be spotted before they become a huge, insurmountable problem. In this way, education for prevention or new remedies can be developed that ultimately will benefit all of us.
Managing health instead of waiting for damage to occur
Instead of waiting for a disease or genetic condition to do its worst before treating it, the focus becomes managed care and how to keep a person out of the hospital. The continuing evolution of wireless communications provides sensors and wearables the ability to transmit data from anywhere and to be collected by the patients at their homes where it’s pushed into the information technology cloud where massive computational and artificial intelligence systems from healthcare institutions store it. Care managers using sophisticated tools can monitor this massive data stream from thousands of patients to keep them healthy. A patient needing advanced cardiovascular support (ACLS) can generate huge amounts of data that can be streamed and joined to his past data for analysis and follow-up treatment decisions. Present and future ACLS recertification programs may want to keep this into account.
The possibility of collecting health data in real time from millions of people is exciting groundbreaking work for data and medical professionals, with the potential to predict the future and identify problems before they create a huge impact. The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance is an example of this kind of data and medical science partnership. Data from insurance and medical records, portable sensors, genetic analysis, and social media participation is collected to create a comprehensive profile of a patient as an individual. This allows a personalized healthcare package that works with and supports your lifestyle to be created.
Your personal data, purged from private identifying information along with thousands of others, can be compared and analyzed for specific threats. Your doctor can work with predictive models to decide a treatment that promises the best results for you according to data collected from similar patients and the same treatments, genetic factors, and lifestyle.
