How Big Data can help fight the healthcare crisis in the future?
Big Data on research in
healthcare and patient care can offer resourceful information in analyzing patterns and trends, thereby offering quality care at lower costs.
While the
healthcare professionals are fighting the pandemic single-handedly today, technology and
data, specifically
Big Data, could help in improving patient care and save lives at a lower cost. ATCS, a technology consulting firm, provides enterprise-level management, digital transformation,
data analytics, and social listening services throughout the globe focusing on developing niche custom solutions using agile and global collaborative method. In this article the author analyses the ways in which data can bring in ease of monitoring for the
healthcare sector, how data can be collected efficiently, and the measures needed to ensure people feel secure about giving their data for the record. – Roop Singh, Executive Director, ATCS
Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has identified new-age technologies to fight and bring in some sanity during this time of crisis. And this brings back to limelight the fundamental concepts around new-age technologies, such as
Big Data. The power of
Big Data to proactively identify meaningful information well in advance assists inadequate planning as well as pre-empting any potential threat. Further, this also assumes significance in situations, such as those prevailing due to COVID-19 in general, particularly for the
healthcare industry.
Digitisation of healthcare data assisting in data analysis
Over the years, the
healthcare sector has generated a lot of historical
data through regulatory requirements, patient care and records kept in the form of prescriptions, written notes, medical imaging, insurance, pharmacies and other administrative
data, which forms as a useful resource of information, which can be further used to derive analytics. Currently, while most of these data in India have been stored in hard copy formats, the recent steps towards ‘digitisation’ of maintaining these records has been fruitful to improve the quality of the overall
healthcare delivery system. IoT devices that have been innovated to capture data from Blood Pressure (BP) of every patient, during time intervals of his/her visits to the hospital or a clinic for a health check-up, collates to form information on their health profiles. Such data points collected for various other check-ups combine to form
Big Data on a health profile of a patient.
A massive volume of
Big Data can be fruitful in assisting decision-makers, medical practitioners and overall medical and
healthcare functionaries in disease surveillance & population health management and can prove to be beneficial for clinical decision support systems as this forms a source of information, also known as ‘analytics’.
Platforms to collect information for Big Data
It could be slightly overwhelming, as the
data collected from the
healthcare sector can be a bit more complex due to its diversity and changing
healthcare scenarios, with the volumes and new diseases coming up every time. In this age of digitisation,
data can be pulled out from Computerised Provider Order Entry (CPOE) that offers clinical
data of patient
healthcare and well-being that makes up the Big Data entirely in the
healthcare industry. To overcome a health scare or a pandemic in future, the
healthcare delivery system can also use data that is available through Electronic Patient Records (EPRs), social media posts, such as on Twitter and Facebook, or even through medical journals and news feeds.
Data Collection
Right and meaningful
data can be collected based on preventive initiatives. The right
data on disease spread can be collected through various applications and techniques, recently introduced across nations globally, that can prove to be beneficial in fighting this pandemic. Data that can be analysed based on population mobility and the data in reference to people being resilient to the virus can also prove to be beneficial in the future.
Long-term leverage of collected data
Population mobility can be addressed with the use of telecom service providers offering information on the movement of population and effectively notifying them in case of a future epidemic or a pandemic. The
data can further be fruitful in confining the disease spread within a specific area or territory.
Data on vulnerable communities can also be gathered to curb them from transmitting any viral diseases. This
data can further be used to allocate resources in such areas, offer to fund and create a model of preventive measures and improvise infrastructures for
healthcare officials to access correct information to offer treatments, issue
healthcare guidelines and medicines well on time.
Big Data offers various advantages at the decision-making level in the
healthcare sector. Analytical information and
data patterns that are available on various pharmaceutical websites, along with the medicines that are being manufactured to cure diseases, can be beneficial in offering patient care at a lower cost in case of an epidemic in future.
Big Data on research in
healthcare and patient care can offer resourceful information in analysing patterns and trends, thereby offering quality care at lower costs. ‘
Big Data on patient care’ is the most informative, as it offers advanced analysis on patient profiles through predictive modelling and segmentation. This enables the decision-makers in the
healthcare sector to offer preventive care, identify disease profiles and determine preventive initiatives to offer patient care protocols that can be followed by them to get the best value for their money.
Identifying challenges and offering solutions
The challenges that we face today revolve around
data privacy, which needs to be managed with steps that can secure
data. A lot of personal
data in terms of location, facial analysis and temperature analysis has been taken by various governments using different technologies across the globe to curb the COVID-19 crisis. Thus, a lot of private
data is being circulated. To secure this, it is important to introduce
data governance mechanisms, where rules must be laid with clear guidelines to access such information and processes must be put in place so that people do not feel insecure about losing their personal
data in the creation of a new world.
Related Article:
https://www.industr.com/en/how-big-data-can-help-fight-the-healthcare-crisis-in-the-future-2533242
