By Dan Quirk, Logicalis Practice Leader – Analytics, Big Data & SAP Solutions
One of the latest uses of Big Data to generate new insights in healthcare is predictive analytics. In addition to the typical administrative and clinical data, hospitals and health systems have started integrating additional data about patients and their environments to better predict outcomes and help target interventions to the right patients. These predictions may help identify new areas to improve quality and efficiency in healthcare across critical areas such as readmissions and treatment optimization.
When it comes to analytics, the healthcare industry is actually catching up to other industries, such as retail and manufacturing. These industries have long invested in the power of analytics to identify buying trends and to better know their customers.
Now, the healthcare industry is also making headway—using new analytics to analyze data across many touch points such as lab results, care notes, family history, environmental factors and the like. With the new technologies that are available, even physician notes, medical records and social media data can be processed and analyzed, thus increasing the likelihood of positive patient outcomes.
These new trends are impacting all areas of healthcare practices. This opens up the possibility of new delivery methods for care through a better understanding of how the consumer “consumes” services in healthcare. In the future, this may even impact how companies design benefit packages for their employees.
In the coming months, watch for additional trends relating to healthcare IT as this blog series explores the many ways in which organizations can leverage Big Data. We will show how Big Data can improve patient outcomes and clinician job satisfaction by providing analytics that enhance the environment in which clinicians and patients interact.