The healthcare industry is one of the world's fastest-growing industries. Healthcare forms an enormous part of a country's economy. Healthcare practices and policies may differ tremendously across various nations. But what remains constant is the aim of every healthcare service provider to improve the general health of people at a nationwide scale.
Intense competition in the healthcare industry has forced healthcare providers to look for ways to augment the quality of care and reduce costs simultaneously. Since traditional methods of healthcare service have proven to be insufficient, the healthcare industry today is embracing the world of technology in order to move towards a value-based perspective.
Presence of Unstructured Data
The healthcare industry not only consists of professionals who directly provide healthcare like doctors and clinicians but also professionals like pharmaceutics, administrators, managers, marketers, lab assistants, investors and shareholders. An industry comprising of such a large number of people, furthermore has to deal with large amounts of unstructured and cluttered data; data related to, patients medical history, diagnosis, clinical-trials, treatments, medicines, clerical data, research & administrative data etc. To add to it, this critical data resides in numerous places like physicians notes, individual EMRs, CRM systems etc. Gathering and making sense of this data has not only proved time consuming for clinical staff but also unproductive. Modern technology is required to analyse these large quantities of data in order to make better-quality decisions which in turn leads to superior healthcare.
Optimum Utility with Big Data Technology
Healthcare organizations are leveraging Big Data technology to capture all the information about a patient to get a comprehensive insight into complete patient care. Big Data helps to convert large amounts of messy data into critical and relevant data. It provides healthcare institutions with a stronger capability in developing preventive and long-term care services. Big Data facilitates healthcare providers to build sustainable healthcare systems, improve collaboration between the different healthcare entities and increase patient access to healthcare.
Role of Big Data in Healthcare Operations
Big data aims to make patient diagnosis and treatment uniform the world over. So far, physicians and doctors have used their personal judgement in order to treat patients for various illnesses. However, with big data there has been a paradigm shift towards evidence-based data wherein the doctor reviews clinical data and makes treatment decisions based on the best available information.
Big data also aims to help the industry address problems related to escalating healthcare spend. Using big data analytics, researchers can mine data to see what treatment is the best for a particular disease, identify patterns related to that disease and gain other important information thereby enhancing patient care and reducing overall healthcare costs.