How Big Data Allows Pre-emptive Healthcare to Prevent Disease

Big data, robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are radically changing the way clinicians diagnose and treat disease.  Gone are the days of “one size fits all” treatment protocols.  Instead, healthcare providers are using centralized data sets that are AI analyzed to provide targeted, personalized healthcare that focuses on prevention rather than cure.

In addition to a swing toward preemptive healthcare, big data is central to the sector’s commitment to capping wasteful expenditure.  Billions that were once raised to manage duplicated records at hospitals, clinics and doctors’ surgeries are now being used for more beneficial outcomes. Modern location data, for example, allows you to “see, at a glance, where all the physicians are within a facility as well as outside its walls,” writes Nathan Sykes about the benefit of big data in emergency medicine. “If an on-call doctor needs to be contacted, you know where they are and exactly how long it’s going to take them to arrive.”

Factor in healthcare apps and wearables that automatically collect and analyze data and prescribe ways for wearers to improve their health and wellbeing, and data-driven technology really is at the coal face of change in the global healthcare sector.

Here are key ways big data is rebooting healthcare and providing a more fact-based approach to the diagnosis and treatment of dreaded diseases:

Sophisticated electronic medical record systems are being rolled out to streamline and optimize data management.  Data is mined from a host of different sources, analyzed and shared on a single platform.  All healthcare providers who have access to these data management systems can tap into patient records and build the data base by adding relevant information to each set.

Shared data translates into huge costs savings.  Personnel are no longer required at each point in the healthcare stream to manage duplicated records.  Up-to-date patient information is instantly available at a single source.

Predictions are that data experts will soon be as important to healthcare as the clinicians themselves.  They’ll primarily be responsible for the sustained management and analysis of massive sets of data known as data lakes.

Another purpose of this sort of managed care using big data is to help keep people healthy at home so they don’t have to make so many trips to the hospital.