Big Data & Healthcare

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Healthcare & Big Data

From 41 years in 1960 to 69 years in 2018, the average life expectancy of India has risen quite substantially. This poses new challenges to existing treatment methods in the country. What further complexes the puzzle is steep population rise? From 44.60 crores in 1960 India’s population will be 138.8 crores in 2020. Big Data aka Healthcare Analytics was never more relevant as it is today for not only solving the problems at hand but also preparing new methods for the future. What if health care professionals could collect massive amounts of data and look for best methods to provide best health care solution? This question has an answer now and is possible through Big Data.

The healthcare system is not only one of the largest industries but also one of the most complex, with patients constantly demanding better care management. The industry is making rapid progress. Specialists seek more effective solutions and new technologies like Big Data are frequently brought to the table of discussions.

Why Big Data cannot be ignored?
  • Potential to Reduce Costs: Big Data is ideal tool to reduce cost of treatment, predict outbreaks of epidemics, avoid preventable diseases and improve quality of life in general.
  • Prevention is better than Cure: This old saying still holds good. Doctors want to understand as much as they can about a patient, as early as possible in their lives so that they can pick up warning signs of serious illness as they arise.
  • Cost of Insurance per Patient will come down: More insights into the Patient’s healthcare data allows Insurance companies to provide tailor made packages. This mitigates risk, provide more suitable package to the patient at a much lower cost of insurance.
  • Patient’s Data in Siloes: Currently patients’ data is available and archived in hospitals, clinics, laboratories etc. It is impossible to communicate properly and make sense of this data. Big Data resolves this deadlock.
Challenges
  • The biggest challenge that we face today in implementing Big Data is how to bring medical data spread across several hospitals, states, dispensaries, medical inspection rooms, emergencies and administrative departments in a collaborative manner to a single destination.
  • While other industries have moved towards Predictive Analytics, Machine Learning and Graph Analytics, healthcare is still using standard regression-based methods.
  • Lack of trained resources puts large number of healthcare and analytics companies in a spot when it comes to managing information supply chain. This includes acquisition to ingestion, storage and provisioning of data points and monetisation of both structured and unstructured data.

Big Data & Electronic Health Records (EHR)

One of the most widespread application of Big Data today is Electronic Health Records (EHR). Every patient has his/her own digital record that includes demographics, medical history, allergies, lab test reports, results etc. Records are shared via Secure Information System and are available to both public and private healthcare providers.

  • Doctors can modify data with no paper work and no danger of data replication, over writing or mismatch.
  • EHRs can also trigger warnings and reminders when a patient should get a new lab test done and track their prescriptions adherence.
  • USA already has taken a major leap with 94% hospitals adopting to this new technology.

According to Mr. Sivaramakrishnan, CIO, Apollo Hospital Enterprise, Chennai, ”Fundamentally, Big Data is helping organisations become more productive, efficient and reduce costs. Big Data also helps in improving patients’ quality of life.”

Advantages of an upskilled Workforce

  • Indian Healthcare industry is generating ZettaBytes (1021 Giga Bytes) of data every day. Growth of the digital data would be exponential and explosive in the next few years. How would the current data handlers manage such an inflow of relentless data?
  • While hiring new talent is definitely on cards, upskilling the existing work force who is already handling Hospital Information Systems and Record Keeping is of more impact.

How Can SkillUp Technologies help you leverage Big Data?

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