How can we use big data in healthcare?

The healthcare industry is now facing multiple challenges, ranging from new disease outbreaks to maintaining an optimal operational efficiency. With Big data analytics, it can help solve these healthcare challenges through the vast amount of data available in the healthcare sector like financial, clinical, R&D, administration and operational data. Big data can contribute in these areas and derive meaningful insights to improve the operational efficiency of the industry reducing among others expenditure in significant numbers. Read the article to know the areas in healthcare where big data plays an crucial role in today’s time

1. Health Tracking: Big Data and Analytics along with the Internet of Things (IoT), is revolutionizing the way one can track various user statistics and vitals. Apart from the basic wearables that can detect the patient’s sleep, heart rate, exercise, distance walked, etc. there are new medical innovations that can monitor the patient’s blood pressure, pulse Oximeters, glucose monitors, and more.

2. Reducing Cost: Big Data can be a great way to save costs for hospitals that either over or under book staff members. Predictive analysis can help resolve this issue by predicting the admission rates and help with staff allocation. This will reduce the Rate of Investment incurred by hospitals and in fact help utilize their investment to the max.

3. Assisting High-Risk Patients: If all the hospital records are digitized, it will be the perfect data that can be accessed to understand the pattern of many patients. It can identify the patients approaching the hospital repeatedly and identify their chronic issues.

4. Preventing Human Errors: A lot many times it has been noted that the professionals tend to either prescribe a wrong medicine or dispatch a different medication by mistake. Such errors, in general, can be reduced since Big Data can be leveraged to analyze user data and the prescribed medication.

5. Advancement in Healthcare Sector: Apart from the current scenario, Big Data can be a great benefit for advancement in science and technology. For Healthcare, Artificial Intelligence, such as IBM’s Watson can be used to surf through numerous data within seconds to find solutions for various diseases. Such advancement is already in progress and will continue to grow with the amount of research collected by Big Data.