How Big Data and Analytics Can Reshape Healthcare

In a bid to deliver high quality healthcare care and improve patient satisfaction, public and private sector hospitals are today looking at streamlining workflow processes, integrating healthcare related data and securing information exchange. Like many developing nations, India too is exploring all ways and means in providing good, cost effective healthcare to its citizens. In doing so, healthcare organizations are increasingly realizing that IT solutions can actually help them meet this challenge by optimizing resource allocation and plugging inefficiencies that cause delay in treatment.  One of the technology solutions that can be leverage quite effectively by healthcare organizations is big data analytics which can go a long way in reducing the cost of healthcare care and improving patient outcomes which in turn could pave the way for a new age in healthcare.

The data resides in multiple places like individual EMRs, lab and imaging systems, physician notes, medical correspondence, claims, CRM systems and finance. Getting access to this valuable data and factoring it into clinical and advanced analytics is critical to improving care and outcomes, incentivizing the right behavior and driving efficiencies.

Today, a significant proportion of the cost and time spent in the drug development process is attributable to unsuccessful formulations. By enabling researchers to identify compounds with a higher likelihood of success, Big Data can help reduce the cost and the time to market for new drugs. Also, by integrating learning from clinical data into the early stages of development, researchers will now be able to customize drugs to suit aggregated patient profiles.   Currently, information privacy concerns are the single biggest obstacle to Big Data adoption in healthcare. Another is the absence of an analytics solution powerful enough to gather massive volumes of largely unstructured health data, perform complex analyses quickly, and trigger meaningful – read life-saving – action in real-time; a solution that could, for instance, gather all the data from ICU monitors which today goes un-stored, put it on the Cloud, decipher significant medical patterns that are yet undiscovered, and trigger a medical action instead of merely an alarm.

Some of the ways in which healthcare vertical could leverage big data and analytics for providing high quality of patient care both for inpatients and outpatients.

-           Remote patient monitoring

-           Tapping into clinical and genomics research data for personalized treatments

-           Build sustainable healthcare systems

-           Collaborate to improve care and outcomes

-           Increase access to healthcare

No-where is the transformative power of big data analytics more meaningful than in the health care sector. The need is to identify the potential that big data analytics holds in itself to transform the way healthcare vertical has been traditionally responding to the patients needs, so far.

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