How Big Data Revolution in Healthcare Can Save People
In the last few decades as we become inundated with information from multiple sources and on virtually everything, the challenge is to organize the information in a way that can prove profitable to all. This gave rise to Big Data revolution. But the effect of Big Data has been more far reaching than anyone could have predicted.
Big Data is changing every aspect of our life and healthcare is not far behind. Big Data revolution has changed healthcare in almost every aspect, across various sectors and verticals. In fact, the future of healthcare today lies in how efficiently we manage, analyze and work with big data. The two aspects of healthcare — a healthier population and affordable care that is still profitable — make it different from any other business. So, any success here must take into account the welfare aspect.
Healthcare organizations have typically been massive beehives of information, records and data. This flows in from multiple sources. There are patient records, organisational records, appointments, employee records, examination reports, invoices, forms, research, medical journals, test results and so on. It comes from people, specialists, insurance companies, suppliers, patients, researchers, pharmacists and more.
For years this data has been gathered together in a scattered manner without any organization or an attempt to integrate and analyze it. This is where Big Data first came in. Technology put the data in pieces that could later be integrated and shared. This was the collection of all data — big and small — into one central bank where everything was organized neatly and could be extracted at moments notices.
A lot of this data comes from the people themselves and not necessarily in the way you imagine. Today people are increasingly turning in their own data through devices that are specially designed to collect health data. For instance, we have health tracking bracelets that record heartbeat, blood pressure etc. Medically wearable technology has been one of the hottest fields in technology today. While it has created better health awareness, it has also created a stream of data.
Adding to wearable technology are the many health apps these days. From hospitals to chemists — every institution and service has an app these days. There are also third party apps, not curated by an organization, but purely want to monitor health.
