Big Data strategies are completely transforming the healthcare industry: reducing costs, optimizing resources, and enabling comprehensive patient medical management.
Collecting and analyzing large volumes of information impacts various sectors, with healthcare being one of the most benefited, as it contributes to improving medical conditions for thousands of people.
The healthcare industry generates enormous amounts of data related to patients, medicine, diseases, research, and macro-data such as clinical records, prescriptions, medical images, studies, and other electronic records.
In fact, by 2025, the amount of health-related data in Spain will be nearly 900 times more than today, mainly due to accelerated digitization and especially the development of health and sports-related mobile applications (wearable devices) capable of monitoring sleep or measuring heart rate and blood oxygen levels.
In this sense, Big Data strategies offer benefits to the medical sector in multiple dimensions. On one hand, they can provide key performance indicators for precise decision-making in terms of funding and resource allocation.
On the other hand, both physicians and healthcare administrators can use data to make more informed and accurate decisions about patient treatments and services, improving their experience.
For example, consolidating patient data into a single record allows for integrated medical care. Collaboration and communication among healthcare professionals to establish a joint treatment plan for the patient is one of the major goals of the healthcare industry. In this regard, Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solutions address the challenge of interoperability and secure data transfer by building a network of health systems that achieve dynamic clinical integration.
Integrated medical solutions also reduce costs by enabling automated, secure, and cloud-based management. These aspects are crucial for this industry, as hospitals and healthcare services need to ensure constant availability and protection from attacks. A serious threat to network security can jeopardize operational continuity and timely, quality patient care. Implementing systems that meet minimum availability and security requirements requires significant infrastructure in hardware, software, and technical personnel. Due to implementation costs and time, cloud solutions are increasingly used, providing savings while maintaining information availability and security.
Data-driven strategies are useful in many other areas of healthcare, for example, in patient care. Chatbots can extract information through simple questions such as name, address, symptoms, current physician, and insurance details. The chatbots then store this information in the medical center’s system to facilitate patient admission, symptom tracking, and communication between the physician, patient, and maintenance of medical records.
Surgical simulation platforms using augmented reality and virtual reality techniques allow surgeons and medical residents to practice interventions in virtual operating rooms that closely resemble reality. Additionally, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis can assist people with hearing impairments: this system can convert spoken words into readable text and display it directly on an augmented reality screen.
Home care benefits from robotics-based services. Patients are monitored intelligently, automatically, and remotely through home care robotic systems, using data collection and analysis.
Furthermore, technologies like 3D and holograms are enhancing the quality of health services: advanced visualization tools, segmentation, and 3D printing allow for anatomically specific models for each patient and become a powerful way to create a better medical experience. Holograms can help radiologists identify injuries or fractures in soft or hard tissues, and innovatively, all patient medical records can be stored digitally, allowing radiologists to easily review them.
In summary, using Big Data for healthcare promises to improve the quality of care in its entirety while reducing costs for all parties involved. Additionally, it has the potential to support various medical and health functions, enhancing and optimizing clinical decision-making and population health management.
By Julio Cesar Blanco – August 25, 2022
