Big Data Meets Healthcare

Most of us can agree that when someone brings up the topic about big data, we intuitively make connections to business and how marketing and financial representatives use it for organizational analysis. However, the awareness of using big data as a purpose for health care has expanded in response to the rapid advancement in technology. Big data has outreached to different areas of healthcare, including clinical data (such as documents, images, clinical or transcribed notes), clinical references (such as drug information), and streamed data (such as telehealth). By developing technologically advanced methods, big data has great potential in transforming our  healthcare system to produce higher quality results and become more cost efficient.

According to McKinsey & Company’s “The ‘big data’ revolution in healthcare: Accelerating value and innovation” report published in January 2013, there are five pathways in which big data can improve our healthcare systems: right living, right care, right provider, right value, and right innovation.

Big data can contribute to one’s way of living by informing consumers and/or patients about how to make healthy lifestyle choices and encourage active empowerment to make these decisions. These decisions can revolve around their diet and exercise.

• Devices, such as smart watches and wristbands, can collect data based on one’s sleeping patterns, exercise, heart rate, and calorie consumption.
• A typical everyday kitchen appliance, the refrigerator, can collect data on one’s consumption habits.

The power of big data can also help stress the importance of patients receiving their appropriate treatments timely and safely. To ensure this happens for patients, there needs to be enough information for analysts to look at, which is why big data is put under the spotlight as a solution.

• One of the doors in which big data unlocks is the opportunity to discover effective DNA-based treatments and medicines more efficiently. By having a mass database containing human and bacteria genetic data, this can potentially help find better ways to treat infections, cancers, and other diseases.
• Another door to which big data holds the key to is wait-time management. Statistics show that 27 percent of Canadians have said that they had to wait for four hours or more in the emergency department. Devices such as the Physicalytics sensors are capable of retrieving data based on how many people are waiting in these rooms and their average wait time. By creating a big database based on this, analysts can make use of this data to ensure patients are having their treatments delivered in a punctual manner.

Additionally, big data can help find the appropriate personnel to deal with each respective case. Big data contributions can benefit the operations management of a healthcare system.

• For example, regarding to the wait-time management topic mentioned earlier, big data can be collected based on which healthcare professionals are needed and the frequency of their needs.  If data shows that the waiting area tends to have more patients that only require a nurse or physician, then the system may need an adjustment by hiring more nurses and physicians. Not only would this increase the efficiency of the health care management, but this would free up the doctors’ availability to perform more urgent tasks. Devices, like the Physicalytics sensors, can collect the number of engagements in the room and the average visit period, which can help allocate the personnel more effectively within the health management system.
• Along with that, big data can also provide information on the necessity of  hosting possible additional training programs for employees. For instance, perhaps the data is telling the human resource department that a cross-training program to train medical assistants as medical receptionists is required in order to make the healthcare organization run more efficiently.

Furthermore, big data helps enhance the value of the healthcare system from different perspectives, such as the consumer’s point of view, the government’s point of view, and the personnel’s point of view. McKinsey & Company’s report mentions how this pathway can touch on the measurement of cost-effectiveness of the system, including the prevention of fraud occurrences.

• Big data can come in handy with this in the form of advanced analytic systems which can have the capabilities to perform checks for fraud, along with the accuracy and consistency of a patient’s claims.

Last but not least, big data encourages the concept of learning new methods of treatment, discovering new medicines, finding new ways to retrieve and analyze data, and improving the overall productivity in the R&D department.

• Duke Medicine, a part of Duke University School of Medicine, has been working on the development of a concept which involves using big data to help build a bridge between their EHR data with a GIS. If this bridge builds successfully, clinicians would be able to have access to more resources that can allow them to learn more about trends of different conditions in different areas and how it can affect the population with their respective regions. As a case in point, trends that can be tracked include smoking behaviors, which can be related to particular geographical designations.

Now what?

There is no doubt that big data has great potential in making promising and phenomenal contributions to our health care sector; however, there is a lack of data scientists and analysts in the labor market. According to McKinsey, they are predicting that the United States will have a shortfall of potentially 190,000 data scientists by the time 2018 comes along. Different organizations are working to connect the young ones in today’s era to STEM programs; the Toronto public board has taken a step by implementing STEM in their summer school programs. These implementations are used to hopefully spark interest in the general field. Only time will tell how big data will transform our healthcare system into a more efficient and smart one.