The healthcare industry has been relatively slow to adopt analytics. Innovation is compelling healthcare providers to embrace data analytics and engage with technology. Traditional methods of handling data can no longer yield desirable results. Today, modern technology has created effective ways to monitor large quantities of information.
With the rising population and increasing life expectancy, the model of delivery treatment is rapidly changing. It is now about understanding patient needs and picking up symptoms of serious illness, if any, at an early stage. Many of the changes in the healthcare delivery model are driven by data analytics. The last decade has witnessed rapid improvement in the amount of data generated, collected, and analyzed. The intersection of trends in Big Data is helping businesses to become more productive.
Improving Healthcare
With analytics, it is easy to analyze disease pattern and outbreaks in any particular geographic location. This can help health agencies determine certain needs and provide health services to prevent any future crises that might harm the population.
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Better Patient Wellness
Apps can monitor everything from your diet to calories burnt to help you plan your diet and stay healthy. Several wearable health devices track health progress. In the future, it will be possible to share this data with your doctor. Further, with analytics, you will have access to an information database that will allow you to identify problems before they are spotted to be prepared in advance.
Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine requires tailoring medicines according to a person’s genetic structure, lifestyle, and location/environment to predict illness and determine the best treatment.
It is likely that medicine and treatment delivery models suggested by doctors will be based on Big Data. Of note, data-sharing arrangements between pharmaceutical giants resulted in breakthrough discovery in curing types of lung cancer.
Follow-Up Care
Big Data can be used to predict the types of patients who are most vulnerable and suggest both how to follow-up and how to prevent relapses of treatment. Apps can be used to track when a patient takes medication, as well as sleep patterns that can alert the doctor or family members if the patient is likely to feel unwell.
Big Data analytics helps doctors understand diseases with rapid advancements in the quantity and quality of data collected with the computing power to analyze the data collected.
Not Working in Silos
Healthcare data is not treated in silos or isolation. Rather, it is meticulously compared and analyzed with the data of thousands of other patients with similar medical conditions and threats. With the advent of data analytics, predictive modeling allows a physician to evaluate the possible results of treatment under consideration. This information is backed up with data from other patients with the same conditions, genetic factors, and lifestyles.
Partnership Between Apple and IBM: A New Beginning
In a major step to overcoming the biggest problem faced by the medical industry regarding the huge amount of information that is often compartmentalized, IBM and Apple have taken a major step ahead. The two tech giants are collaborating on a Big Data health platform to let iPhone and Apple users share data on the IBM Watson Health cloud analytics service. The primary aim is to discover new medical insights and biometric data from millions of users.
Conclusion
Big Data has the potential to completely transform the healthcare industry. However, everything boils down to selecting the right Big Data analytics company, leveraging the potential of emerging technology services, and having a commitment to innovation. It is about anticipating the future and willingness to build capabilities to create a value proposition and help patients experience better outcomes and a healthy life.
Date: April 15, 2017
Source: Dzone