Book Review: “Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare”
There is much potential for big data in the healthcare realm. From utilizing patients’ socioeconomic data to cost reduction: countless applications are possible. That being said, the general population is often intimidated or even misinformed when it comes to such topics. “Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare” is aiming to remedy this by investigating how healthcare organizations can leverage big data and related disciplines to discover new business value, use cases, and general knowledge as well as how big data can be integrated into pre-existing business intelligence and analytics activities.
Written by Prashant Natarajan, John C. Frenzel and Detlev H. Smaltz, the 210 page book is a quick read. Here are my impressions:
Keeping it simple
The authors and editors made a great effort to keep the language simple enough so that health practitioners of all levels, tech enthusiasts, educators and decision makers can understand.
Lots of concrete facts, numbers
The book is packed with statistics and diagrams on current (and future) big data applications. For example, you’ll learn that “73% of organizations surveyed (by Gartner) in 2014 were investing or panning to invest in big data by 2016. However, in 2012, Gartner found that only 13% of those surveyed had actually deployed big data solution. Fast forward to 2015; among 3,000 surveyed organizations, 17% were actively using big-data (defined here as exclusively Hadoop-based) solutions.”.
Case studies
“Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare” also comes with a number of case studies featuring diverse organizations such as (faith-based) Ascension, US Health Insurance Organization, Penn Medicine, Arterys and more.
The same “keeping it simple” approach in the main chapters was used there, making the case studies accessible to most stakeholders in and outside of healthcare.
I really enjoyed the book, it was well-written, insightful and “user-friendly” at the same time. Highly recommended.
Published by CRC Press, “Demystifying Big Data and Machine Learning for Healthcare” is available at Amazon in hardcover and Kindle formats.
