Exclusive article by Lindsey Patterson at EMRIndustry.com
The big data wave is determined to revolutionize every sector, including human resources, sales, healthcare, and medicine. The collection and analysis of data aren’t new trends in healthcare. For centuries, medical research and discovery have always been based on patient information and patterns of sickness — who becomes ill and how and why they became ill. The only thing that has changed is the quality and the quantity of data flowing into the healthcare industry.
Today, the amount of data available is large. This increases the potential for change and breakthroughs like never before. We have sensors in every smartphone, and medical professionals can share information across disciplines. The data generated in the healthcare industry keeps growing in leaps and bounds. The industry has responded with the adoption of systems with immense data capabilities to facilitate quick, cost-effective processing of this data and improve services.
Industrial Internet
Also referred to as the healthcare Internet of Things (IoT), industrial internet refers to the fast growing number of smart, interconnected gadgets — sensors and various equipment/devices — found in healthcare facilities these days. Industrial Internet generates and moves around large volumes of data on a daily basis. These devices monitor, measure, and transmit data regarding blood pressure, electrocardiograms, glucose levels, and all sorts of patient behavior which results in a mammoth of unstructured data within a facility. This creates a major role for advanced big data analytics like Hadoop and many others.
Key improvements in the field have led to the emergence of more sophisticated industrial internet devices in healthcare. With the current crop of healthcare IoT devices, measurements have to be followed up by regular physician visits. The newer devices can transmit relevant data to the doctor with minimum follow-up visits. There are also smart medicine dispensers that can show whether medications are being taken according to physician instructions. The level of data capabilities offered by healthcare IoT devices present limitless big data capabilities in the healthcare industry.
Real-Time Healthcare Data
One of the most recent developments in the healthcare industry is the deployment of real-time data processing capability that uses events and key indicators to provide situational awareness, operational effectiveness, and clinical insights in a health care facility. The availability of real-time information increases visibility in all dimensions of health care delivery. This ushers in a new computing paradigm that greatly improves patient care.
Stream processing is a perfect example of real-time healthcare data technology that exceeds patient engagement expectations, provider experience, and future standards of care. It offers the ideal platform for processing data streams in addition to analyzing and acting on real-time data using streaming analytics. These solutions are fault tolerant in architecture, highly available, scalable, and are designed to hand high volumes of data in real time.
Data Security
Health records contain some of the most confidential information a person can have. Details such as prescription information, Medicare information, social security number, and credit card data can all be found in a person’s medical records. There have been concerns about the security of a patient’s confidential information with the rising cases of cyber-attacks that often result in stolen identities and other issues.
However, due to improvements in hospitals’ data capabilities brought about by big data, patient information has never been more secure. The use of big data analytics can detect behaviour or identify network changes that indicate a potential cyber-attack.
These are just a few ways the healthcare sector has improved services via its data handling capabilities. Technological advancements and big data analytics are attributable to most of the improvements in data capabilities in the healthcare industry. Consequently, the quality of patient care in health care facilities has improved greatly.
