Why Has Big Data Analytics Become an Important Part of Healthcare Industry?

The healthcare industry is booming at a faster rate but it is also facing many challenges like how to tackle the new disease outbreak, how to maintain optimal operational efficiency, how to improve patient care and how to bring innovative medicines etc. The demand of patients for better care at their convenience is also increasing rapidly. Therefore, advancement and innovation in medical science is required urgently and we need a different approach to deal with these issues. Big data and advanced analytics can present solutions to many of these new challenges. There is plethora of data available to players in the healthcare industry including financial, R&D, clinical, administration and operational data. Application of big data an Analytics in healthcare can generate meaningful insights to improve the overall efficiency in this field. The rapid growth in the healthcare data analytics sector also points towards the fast adoption of big data in healthcare.

Below are the ways in which Big Data Analytics can help and change the entire scenario of the Healthcare sector.

Monitoring Health of People

Big Data and Analytics is revolutionizing the monitoring of health of people around the world through various tools and healthcare mobile apps. IoT is also contributing in this regard. By these, various health parameters of patients can be monitored and vital statistical data of users can be generated and analyzed. There are already many wearables in the market which can detect the patient’s sleep, heart rate, exercise, distance walked and new medical innovations that can monitor patient’s blood pressure, glucose, pulse etc. Recently some apps also claim to monitor patient’s hemoglobin and indicators of major diseases. This continuous monitoring of body vitals along with the sensor data will generate lots of data and using Big Data Analytics it can be analyzed so that people can come to know about their health issues early and they get the required medical care on time.

Reducing Overall Cost to Run Hospitals

Big Data and Analytics can help the hospitals to save lots of their operational costs as they can handle better their staff which either is over utilized or under-utilized. Predictive analysis can help resolve this issue by predicting the number of admissions on particular day and help in staff allocation. This way the hospitals can reduce their investment and utilize it to the max. The insurance companies can save money by backing wearables and health trackers to make sure that patients do not spend time in the hospital. It will also save the waiting times of patients as the hospital will have optimal staff and bed available as per the big data analytics all the time.

Eliminating Human Errors

Many time it happens that either the doctor prescribes a wrong medicine or a wrong medicine is delivered or given to the patient at the hospital chemist shop by mistake. These kind of mistakes can be very harmful for the patients but these can be eliminated by the use of Big Data and analytics as it will analyze the user data and the prescribed medication. It can analyze the data and flag the inappropriate medicine prescriptions and will eliminate mistakes and save lives. Such a software can be a handy tool for the physicians who has to deal with large number of patients everyday.

More Cutting Edge Research in Healthcare Sector

Big Data and Analytics can also lead to more cutting edge research in healthcare sector. We can use Artificial Intelligence in this regard for example AI tool such as IBM’s Watson can be used to go through large amount of data within seconds to find solutions for various diseases. This sort of advanced technology and its application is already happening in the market and it will become more intense with the research on Big Data. It will provide accurate solutions and offer customized solutions for unique problems. Predictive analysis will help the patients traveling to a distant location by studying similar patients in that region.

Helping Severely-ill Patients

If all the records of a hospital are digitized, then it can turn into a highly useful data to access for understanding the patterns of many patients especially the severely-ill ones. It can identify the patients which visit the hospital repeatedly and identify their chronic issues. Such an understanding will help the hospital in providing better care to these patients and will also provide an insight into corrective measures to reduce their frequent visits. It is a great way to keep an eye on the severely-ill patients and in providing them more customized care and services.

Conclusion

We are still in the beginning face of the implementation of Big Data and Analytics in healthcare sector but as we have just discussed it has lots of potential. Big data is not fully utilized due to lack of technologies and funds but its future in healthcare sector looks very bright. More and more companies and hospitals are now investing in this space and innovatively bringing more mobile apps, devices, tools and technologies to help people and patients and ultimately hospitals too.