How Big Data Enhances Healthcare Industry
Big Data is now more popular than ever and is already completely transforming various industries and healthcare is no exception. For example, according to analysts, the Big Data healthcare market will reach $27.6bn by the end of 2021. Such staggering numbers mean that medical institutions and other businesses are investing in various solutions based on Big Data. In this article, we will look at a few examples of Big Data in healthcare so that you have a complete picture of how Big Data can improve this industry. So, without further ado, let’s get started.
Main Reasons Why Big Data Revolutionize Healthcare Industry
Before diving into the use cases, it’s worth understanding the basics. There are several types of information in health care:
- Social media data. This section includes various information that is taken from applications for health care as well as various popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, and others)
- Device-to-device data. This is data taken from various devices such as fitness trackers and other devices that monitor certain indicators of a person’s vital activity.
- Financial data. The name speaks for itself. This category includes data from documents on payment for treatment and other financial transactions.
- Biometric data. This includes a variety of fingerprint scans, X-rays, MRI scans, and more.
- Human-created data. Quite an extensive item that includes medical paper cards, certificates, extracts, and other documentation.
- Research data. This can include data on new treatments, the effects of testing new drugs, learning about new diseases, and more.
Big Data allows you to transform the usual healthcare process, redirecting all the power to a fast and high-quality treatment process. In addition, Big Data does an excellent job of forecasting. For example, the power of the analysis can be assigned to predict the financial costs of a medical institution in a particular period in the future. This analysis considers dozens of variables and influencing factors, such as epidemiological indicators, hospital occupancy, the number of doctors in the hospital, and more.
In addition, Big Date makes it easy to identify patterns and avoid repeated hospitalizations. For example, doctors can track the frequency of return visits, which treatments were used, and which data results. In-depth analysis allows you to make the necessary adjustments to the treatment process to maximize its effectiveness and avoid repeated hospital visits.
Main Use Cases of Big Data in the Healthcare Industry
So, we figured out how Big Data helps to make healthcare better. It’s time to move on to the core part of our article, namely to consider the main ways of using Big Dates in everyday medical activities.
Use Case #1. Disease Diagnosis and Predictive Measures
Big Data is an excellent diagnostic tool because, with the help of this technology, you can collect a large amount of data about a patient’s health and send it directly to the device to a personal doctor.
And when this technique is applied to thousands of patients, a huge amount of data is collected on various health conditions. This is where artificial intelligence algorithms come into play that analyses these data arrays and can issue personal recommendations to each patient based on this data. This allows you to quickly determine the diagnosis of the patient and select an individual treatment strategy. Such a comprehensive analysis also helps predict the results of treatment of the disease in one way or another to select the ideal option for each patient.
Use Case #2. Financial Operations
Financial management in medical institutions is always a headache for accountants because the amount of incoming data is simply off the scale. However, Big Date comes to the rescue in this case too. With the help of this technology in medical institutions, you can create an automatic analysis of incoming and outgoing funds, which allows you to significantly reduce the number of financial miscalculations. In addition, the analysis helps to formulate the pricing policy of the medical institution, which will be most beneficial for both the medical institution and the patients. Thus, the convenience of expenses and income control goes to a new level with the introduction of Big Date into the work of a medical institution.
Use Case #3. Research Activities
The development of new drugs and other research is always associated with tons of different data that require processing and analysis. Big Data helps in processing research and clinical trials results, based on which drugs will be further supplied to mass production.
In addition, based on the analysis of various genetic data, medical scientists can analyse risk factors and, based on the analysis, evaluate the progression of various diseases.
Use Case #4. Unique Business Model
Big Data is an excellent foundation for various innovative business models that can benefit a variety of healthcare sectors. The collection and analysis of data is ongoing, and this data can help other businesses in their activities. For example, third-party data aggregators may provide pharmaceutical companies with patient history data for a fee. Thus, aggregators get revenue from data, while pharmaceutical companies get data to help them develop more effective drugs. This is a win-win situation.
Use Case #5. Predictions
With the current situation with COVID-19, this point is particularly relevant. Big Data analysis allows you to create a virtual model of the health of the population of each country and predict the further behaviour of the disease in a particular region. In addition, it helps to predict possible outbreaks of other diseases by taking into account various factors. This helps to take the right action to fight against existing diseases and take preventive measures against potential ones.
Use Case #6. Telemedicine
Telemedicine is on the rise, and main and the main flagship of healthcare mobile app development since 42% of Americans are now using it. And this technology only benefits from the implementation of Big Data. Data analysis allows doctors to make diagnoses from a distance much more accurately and prescribe the ideal treatment course for each patient individually. Thus, it is many times easier for doctors to examine patients, and patients receive high-quality medical advice without leaving home.
Use Case #7. Health Monitoring
The more patients one attending physician has, the more difficult it is to keep track of them all. In such situations, real-time monitoring based on Big Data technology comes to the rescue. It records and stores readings from all sensors that are on the patient. Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms, this data can be analyzed in real-time, and tracking changes in health indicators becomes much easier. In connection with the Internet of Things, this approach becomes even more useful since it becomes possible to notify the doctor’s device if one of the patients has changed indicators that affect his recovery.
Main Development Pitfalls
Despite all the useful use cases, the development of Big Data in healthcare is associated with certain pitfalls that slightly slow down the growth of the popularity of this technology. And if you are going to invest in this technology, you should know about them:
- IT specialists shortage. The healthcare industry is experiencing an acute shortage of qualified IT staff to manage and support Big Data technology in healthcare facilities. And at the moment, the greater the demand for Big Data, the more the lack of IT specialists is felt.
- Low financing. At the moment, funding for Big Data development is not as huge as many would like.
- Not-so-great security. Working with Big Data requires access to this data, and the bigger team works on it, the more confidentiality is violated.
- Interoperability issues. The industry faces the challenge of interoperating different healthcare systems due to the lack of defined standards and the old-fashioned approach.
Wrapping Up
As you can see, Big Data is truly a great technology that is transforming the healthcare industry, making it more technological and improving internal processes. By using data correctly, healthcare providers can improve financial operations, predict outbreaks, and improve patient care. And every year, this technology will be more and more introduced due to the undeniable advantages that it brings to the industry.
