Big Data strategies are completely transforming the health industry: they reduce costs, optimize resources and allow comprehensive medical management of the patient.

The collection and analysis of large volumes of information has an impact on a variety of sectors, with health being one of those that can benefit the most from its application since it thus contributes to the improvement of the medical conditions of thousands of people. 

The healthcare industry generates a huge amount of data that revolves around patients, medications, diseases, research and big data such as medical records, prescriptions, medical images, studies and other electronic records.

In fact, by 2025 alone, the amount of data related to the health sector in Spain will be almost 900 times more than today, more due to accelerated digitalization but above all, to the development of mobile applications related to health and sports (wearable devices) capable of monitoring sleep or measuring heart rate and blood oxygen levels.

In this sense, Big Data strategies They offer benefits to the medical sector in multiple dimensions. On the one hand, they can provide key performance indicators to make accurate decisions in terms of financing and resource allocation.

On the other hand, both medical professionals and healthcare administrators can use data to make much more informed and accurate decisions about treatments and services for patients and improve their experience as patients.

For example, Consolidating patient data into a single record enables integrated healthcare. Collaboration and communication between health professionals to establish a joint treatment plan for the patient is one of the great objectives of the health industry. In this sense, EDI (electronic data interchange) solutions solve the challenge of interoperability and secure transfer of that data by building a network of health systems that achieve dynamic clinical integration.

Integrated medical solutions also reduce costs by enabling automated, secure, cloud-based management. These last points are key for this industry, given that hospitals and health services need to take extreme measures to keep their environment always available, but also free of attacks. A serious threat to network security can jeopardize operational continuity and timely, quality patient care. In order to implement systems that meet the minimum availability and security requirements, a significant infrastructure in hardware, software and technical personnel is required. Given the costs and implementation times, cloud solutions are currently being implemented, which allow savings while maintaining the availability and security of information.

Strategies involving data are useful in many other areas of healthcare, e.g. When it comes to patient care, chatbots can extract information using simple questions such as name, address, symptoms, current doctor, and insurance information. Chatbots then store this information in the medical center's system to facilitate patient admission, symptom tracking, and doctor-patient communication and medical record keeping.

From surgical simulation platforms that use augmented reality and virtual reality techniques, Surgeons and resident doctors can perform interventions in virtual operating rooms that closely resemble reality. In addition, automatic speech recognition and text-to-speech synthesis can be used to help people with hearing loss: this system can take the narrator's speech and convert it into readable text and display it directly on an augmented reality screen.

Home care finds support in robotics-based services. Patients are intelligently, automatically and remotely monitored by controlling the robotic home care system based on data collection and analysis.

Going even further, Technologies such as 3D and holograms are improving the quality of health services: Advanced visualization, segmentation, and 3D printing tools enable patient-specific anatomical models and become a powerful way to create a better medical experience. In the case of holograms, they can help radiologists identify injuries or any other fractures in the soft or hard tissues of patients and most innovatively, all the patient's medical records can be stored digitally, so a radiologist can examine medical history easily.

Ultimately, the use of Big data for healthcare promises to improve the quality of care across the board while reducing the cost for all parties. Additionally, it has the potential to support various medical and healthcare functions, improving and optimizing clinical decision making and population health management.

Julio Cesar Blanco – August 25, 2022