Recent studies have revealed that 80 percent of medical data is unstructured, although clinically relevant; and these data can be traced in multiple locations like physician notes, medical correspondence, individual EMRs, lab and imaging systems, CRM systems, finance and claims.
Even though healthcare organizations are leveraging big data technology to capture all of the information about a patient to get a more complete view about the medical data, getting access to this valued data and categorizing it into clinical and advanced analytics is crucial for building sustainable healthcare systems that are more accessible.
Impact of Big Data Apps in Healthcare Sector
While the world is talking about Big Data, in the healthcare sector big data originates from the large electronic health datasets that are very challenging to manage with the conventional hardware and software. Studies have shown that when we consider the technology impact, Big Data is found to be evolving to make real-life implementations for instance in semantic technologies, scalable data analytics and data storage, including machine learning to name a few.
At the same time these techniques can be combined and extended to address big data paradigm, while ensuring that domain-specific requirements are addressed. Big Health Data technologies can facilitate existing healthcare business intelligence, health data analytics and health data management application to the next level by providing means for the effective handling and analysis of complex and large healthcare data by relying on the following:
Healthcare Applications of Hadoop and Big data
One of the most frequently asked question is, “what is the BIG connection between Hadoop and big data”? Experts reveal that the only technology that allows healthcare to store data in its native form is Hadoop. This technology facilitates the decision making process as to what can come (and also what cannot come) into our data warehouse or the electronic medical record - as it is the only platform that regardless of data format or the speed at which it can be imbibed, can help data storage.
Hospital Network
Hospitals are now increasingly using Big Data in healthcare to provide the best clinical support, reduce the cost of care measurement and manage the population of high-risk patients. Hadoop applications help healthcare experts analyze incessant data pouring in real time from diverse sources such as financial data, payroll data, and electronic health records. These comprehensions help clinicians analyze and decide the most conducive treatment plans for one or more patient.
Monitoring Patient Vitals
Hadoop technology is also widely used in several hospitals across the world for patient care systems to help the hospital staff work efficiently with Big Data. Hospitals use sensor beside patient’s bed that can help them incessantly track vital signs such as heartbeat, blood pressure and the respiratory rate; and Hadoop ecosystem components - Hive, Flume, Sqoop, Spark, and Impala help to store and analyze the vital signs. In eventuality of any change in pattern, the system generates an alert that is sent to the team of healthcare providers.
For Cancer Treatments and Genomics
Research indicates that 3 billion base pairs constitute the human DNA; and when it comes to fighting cancer, it is all the more necessary for large amounts of data to be organized in an effective manner – considering cancer mutates in diverse patterns and reacts in different ways based on the genetic depiction of an individual. This is where leveraging Hadoop technology can prove to be worthwhile. Not only does Hadoop apps offer great support for parallelization, it also uses MapReduce programs to help mapping the 3 billion DNA base pairs.
Fraud Prevention and Detection
Insurance companies have been harnessing Hadoop’s capability to store large unstructured data while using MapReduce to analyze this data, in successfully developing predictive models to detect fraudsters – by helping in the analysis and detection of patterns in the field of Fraud Detection. This is done by making use of real-time and past data of medical claims, weather data, wages, voice recordings, demographics, cost of attorneys and call center notes as well.
Healthcare Intelligence
Healthcare Insurance Business harnesses the potential of Hadoop technology to facilitate hospitals, payers and healthcare agencies increase their competitive advantages by creating smart business solutions with associated costs (the risk) and dividing it proportionally as per the number of members in the risk group. Such data will help the insurer calculate the cost of insurance policy.
Is your healthcare business ready to benefit from Big data & Hadoop apps?
