The impact of Cloud and Big Data on Healthcare Sector
In the coming decades, the healthcare industry is predicted to grow at an unprecedented rate, and so is the data associated with it. It is expected to produce petabytes, exabytes or even zettabytes of data through the information collected from EHRs, laboratories, medical equipment and from the patient themselves. It will become more challenging for IT industries to analyze such enormous amount of data and turn all this into actionable medical sights. Embedding this Big Data to the healthcare sector and housing it on Cloud offers an effective solution to these issues.
Introducing Big Data in healthcare along with Cloud computing will provide a new direction to medical models. And no doubt, there will be an increase in profit with better business intelligence. With the involvement of Cloud, healthcare industry becomes capable of uploading more information, while Big Data analytics dig on insights related to this data, thereby giving a progressive future path to the healthcare sector.
Let’s have a look how cloud and Big Data together impact the healthcare sector:
Big Data Analytics making efficient use of medical data
A lot of data is produced on a routine basis by hospitals, laboratories, retail, and non-retail medical operations and promotional activities. But most of it gets wasted because respective persons are not able to figure out what to do with that data. This is where Cloud-based Big Data comes into the picture. The big data analytics tools and repositories remove the hard thinking and generate reliable and calculative insights out of huge volumes of data within a matter of seconds. This means in the future we will need more doctors who are trained to work with big data . The big data revolution is bringing up sophisticated methods of consolidating information from tons of sources. The focus is on providing the most relevant and updated information to doctors and medical practitioners in real time while they are consulting their patients.
Cloud-Based Big Data store and analyzing data from all possible resources
Up till now the collection of data is limited to the major available resources in the healthcare sector. However, with the advent of smartphone apps and wearables, data is now everywhere. And this allows practitioners to know patients’ health conditions in a more precise manner. Apps that act like pedometers to measure your steps, the calorie counter for your diet, the app for monitoring and recording heart rate, blood pressure and blood sugar levels, and wearable devices like Fitbit, Jawbone etc. are all sources of data nowadays. In the near future, the patient will share this data with the doctor who can utilize it as a diagnostic toolbox to provide better treatment in less time. This raises the trend of a partnership between medical and data analyst like Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance — where they are committed to collect record from various health-related instruments.
Big Data in clinical trials and epidemics
Doctors prescribing the pills and potions with the help of Big Data analytics isn’t a distant dream. The data sharing practices between pharmaceutical giants over the cloud helps the researchers to pick the best subjects. Recently, during a clinical trial big data revealed one such big finding i.e. desipramine can also be used in curing lung cancer. According to Flatiron Health’s service, OncologyCloud, 96% of potential data on cancer patients is yet to be analyzed. And, big data analytics can help sort it out. Big data is also helping out in developing personalized medicine by recognizing unique genetic makeup and in fighting against epidemics.
Privacy and Security of Medical data
Patients’ medical data is highly personal and needs to be protected and secured against loss and theft. Recently the largest healthcare data theft took place where cyber thieves have stolen medical records of 80 million patients from Anthem. With the improved computing technology and enablement of big data in the healthcare sector, privacy and security issues can be dealt with prima facie. The centralization of medical data is a subject of concern but big data certainly plays a key role in the development of new treatments and drugs as long as privacy and security can be maintained.
Improved computing resources at lower initial capital
Cloud computing is playing a vital role in making healthcare industry more patient-centric and data-driven. It helps in storing a large amount of data and sharing information among hospital, physicians, data analysts, and patients at a lower initial capital. It supports big data set for storing and computing medical imaging like radiology, genomic data offloading and collecting Electronic Health Records. It is a boundary-less and flexible way to compute and store data. Incorporating Cloud-based Big Data increases collaboration and security in a cost-effective manner.
Conclusion
As technology continues to have a deeper impact on our daily medical operations, the digital platforms like Big Data and Cloud help doctors to stay on top of patient information. With smart and efficient analytics, new treatment measures will emerge, and patient diagnostic and preventive measures will continue to improve. Healthcare software application development will also change accordingly.
